Today’s Literacy Headlines

The number of California students who cannot read is shocking. Results from the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress show that only 32% of fourth graders are reading proficiently. These results put California below the national average and behind 25 other states. While the ranking is cause for concern, the difference in absolute performance exposes a reading crisis in California. Our students are over a year and half behind Massachusetts, the top-ranking state. The key to developing strong readers is providing teachers with the preparation and knowledge they need for excellent instruction. By making teaching practices based on the science of reading a budgetary and policy priority, California can intentionally invest in the science of what works and give all new and existing teachers the resources they need to help early and struggling readers reach their full potential in life.

For 25 years, teaching children how to read has been Sarah Odom’s priority. “It’s just very important to see children have the opportunity to succeed,” Odom said. That success starts in settings like the Hattiesburg Public School Early Childhood Center in downtown Hattiesburg, where Odom is a pre-K parent-educator. She teaches parents how to work on reading skills with their children, so early on the child can do things like identify upper and lower case letters and know the sounds they make. There are everyday methods Odom teaches parents to use to make learning fun for the child. Odom tells parents while they are reading to their child, ask their child questions about the story, retell the story, and find numbers around the room. “That helps the children to build background knowledge and expand on ideas, and understand and make inferences that they need to be able to do when they reach that third-grade reading gate,” Odom said.

What if a short digital game for young children could help lower the high school drop out rate? That’s a long-range goal of a new effort by a team from Boston Children’s Hospital in collaboration with Florida State University, which has developed a 15 to 20-minute game that tests children’s early literacy skills and generates a red flag for those in need of extra support. Research shows if a child is not reading by the end of third grade, they are far more likely to drop out of high school, which means early support can be critical. Called the Boston Children’s Hospital Early Literacy Screener, the new game is administered on a touchscreen tablet. Kids as young as 4-years-old do tasks geared at assessing their literacy skills with the help of on-screen cartoon animals. Those include touching the picture that matches the word that is said out loud, identifying rhyming words, and finding the picture that matches a spoken sentence.

All of us obviously want to help our students become better writers. But are there ways we can “double-dip,” too—in other words, help them improve their writing AND also use writing instruction to improve reading skills? We’ll explore that question today with Tony Zani, Mary Tedrow, Mary Beth Nicklaus, Colleen Cruz, and Pam Allyn. Zani says, “Writing directly benefits students’ reading skills. For example, if you have students write about what they’ve read or learned (for nearly any content or age), you’ll dramatically improve reading comprehension. Students are often forced to reread and think more deeply about what they’ve read. When students have to consider a controversial question and use texts they’ve read to defend their point of view, reading comprehension is off the charts. In our school, we’ve emphasized writing about what we read. It took about two years for most teachers, and students, to really embrace the concept. It was about that time that our end-of-year reading scores had a huge jump. Our highly impacted Title I school made enormous growth just because students were better at thinking about what they read.”

At the heart of a sweeping plan to improve education in Maryland with billions in added funding is the goal of addressing inequities in schools that serve high numbers of children in poverty — a problem experts in education say is a fundamental one in the United States. A state commission that has spent three years studying how to make Maryland schools competitive with the world’s best found a common problem: the state invests more in schools serving affluent communities than it does on schools in areas with high poverty. “Kids growing up in poverty need more resources, and so a major portion of our recommendations are aimed at putting the resources into the schools where there are lots of low-income kids and providing them support,” said William Kirwan, who chaired the 25-member commission.

The Smithsonian Institution is teaming up with IDW Publishing on a series of educational graphic books that will start to be released this fall. One series will include books for middle-school readers inspired by “Time Trials,” a set of videos from the National Museum of American History that introduces figures from the past, like the traitor Benedict Arnold and the abolitionist John Brown, and encourages the audience to discuss their actions. Other series will draw upon the cultural and scientific knowledge of the Smithsonian, the behemoth of an educational and research complex that includes the National Zoo and 19 museums.

Books have broad vocabulary and diverse language structures that are important for developing the ability to understand content. “Long, continuous texts with diverse and colorful vocabulary improve the skill to understand the content of the text,” says associate professor Minna Torppa. With other researchers of education and psychology from the universities of Jyväskylä, Turku, and Eastern Finland, she participated in a large project that studied children’s free-time reading habits and their effects. “In addition to books, we also wanted to study other text types such as newspapers, magazines, and digital texts,” Torppa says.

Spanish remains the language most frequently spoken by English-learners in U.S. schools by a wide margin, with roughly 76 percent of the nation’s 5 million English-learners speaking Spanish, but the numbers for several other languages are surging. Overall, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Somali were the top five languages spoken by English-language learners in the nation’s K-12 public schools during the 2016-17 school year, according to recently released data from the U.S. Department of Education. Roughly 1 in 6 of the Arabic-speaking English-learners, about 21,000 students, attend schools in Michigan, which has a large Arab-American population. Altogether, almost 83 percent of the nation’s English-learners are native speakers of one of the five top languages, but there is plenty of linguistic diversity among the nation’s English-learners: The Education Department report found that 50 languages were represented among individual states’ top five most commonly spoken languages.

I’m going to try something a little different with the Final Prediction Edition this year. Last year was … well, frankly it was lamentable. A poor showing. An embarrassment of prediction-ish-ness. Quite frankly, my finger was so far away from the pulse of the award committees that I might as well have been across the sea. My one and only successful prediction was for The Book of Boy and that wasn’t even on my final prediction list. I got bupkiss. Not even a Caldecott. So! I’m changing things up. This year I’m splitting my predictions into three categories: Best Chances, Maybes, and Probably Nots, in a desperate attempt to improve on 2019’s worst prediction year ever. Now let’s get started!!

Why aren’t our children learning to read? At its debut, the Common Core gave hope that we could improve the reading, writing, and math outcomes of American children being outpaced by their international peers. While there isn’t one single reason why Common Core hasn’t affected literacy outcomes as significantly as hoped, a glaring shortcoming is the inefficient way students are taught to read. We have not done enough to educate our teachers, school leaders, and policymakers about what it actually takes for a child to learn to read. Our youngest readers — in prekindergarten through second grade — need reading instruction rooted in science to build a foundation. By the time students leave third grade they are no longer learning to read, but reading to learn. If they do not have the basic skills to break the code, they will struggle to acquire vocabulary and background knowledge from text, and to comprehend more complex text and ideas.

Several times a week, Rebecca Mettler makes a 92-mile round-trip to Springfield to take her 4-year-old son to preschool. Mettler, a journalist who lives in Sarcoxie, worried that without the preschool, her only son — diagnosed as deaf — would not gain the social, academic and communication skills needed to learn and succeed in school and life. Enrolled in Missouri State University’s Preschool for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, the boy has been thriving. Tara Oetting, a clinical professor at MSU, said the preschool helps children, ages 3-5, develop language, speech, academic development and early literacy. “There are a lot of different teaching strategies that we have to use that are not necessarily in normal hearing programs.”

Everyone agrees civics education needs redefining, but the concept is becoming too broad—and some new initiatives may lead to further polarization. Instead of rethinking civics, we need to rethink basic assumptions about teaching and learning. There may be another way of engaging kids in civic activities that also helps address a different but equally serious civics-related problem: the precipitous decline of local journalism. In the last 15 years, more than 1,800 local print outlets have gone out of business, and at least 200 American counties have no newspaper at all. In some areas, college newspapers are filling the void, covering city council and school board meetings. Why not have high school students do that too? True, there are obstacles—not the least of which is that our deeply flawed approach to writing instruction has left many teenagers unable to express themselves well in writing. But with the right kind of support from adults, perhaps including laid-off journalists, they might acquire crucial writing skills while performing a public service—and gain an understanding of how government works.

Joan Spoerl scurried out from behind her book-lined table in Outhwaite Community Center, where parents and children lined up to make snow globes and take photos with Santa. She steered an expectant mother over, with the promise of another gift: free books for her little one, mailed to her home every month. Spoerl’s mission this December day — and every day — is to sign up more children for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which provides books for children from birth to age five. Parton started the program nearly 25 years ago in her home county in Tennessee. The country singer has said it was her father, who couldn’t read or write, who inspired her. Imagination Library came to Greater Cleveland close to 3 years ago, one of several programs aimed at bolstering early childhood development and kindergarten readiness, which are key to success in school and beyond. Managed locally by the non-profit Literacy Cooperative, the program mails books to more than 9,500 kids, enrolled at libraries and events by a network of partners, and Spoerl, who directs the effort.

Cynthia Leitich Smith checked a stack of books out of her local public library almost every Saturday morning as a little girl growing up in the ’70s near Kansas City. She read practically everything she could get her hands on, with one exception. “If I saw books that had Native people on the cover, I wouldn’t pick them up,” Smith said. “I was opening up those books, and I was maybe seeing this really stilted speech, or girls and women being completely erased from the narrative.” Stereotypical misconceptions about Native people in the land of the Kansas City Chiefs prompted Smith to keep her identity as a citizen of Muscogee (Creek) Nation away from other kids. That changed by 2000, when Smith published her first of many bestselling children’s and young adult books featuring Native American characters. HarperCollins Children’s Books recently tapped Smith to lead Heartdrum, a new imprint set to launch in early 2021 emphasizing contemporary Native characters and genre fiction.

When they look back on their own careers as children’s book authors and illustrators, Grace Lin and Jarrett J. Krosoczka are both struck by one theme in particular: creating their early artwork at a family kitchen table, and wondering how they might ever be published themselves. In addition, Lin, who is Taiwanese-American and grew up in upstate New York, doesn’t recall ever seeing Asian faces in the stories she read as a kid (and there were almost none in her own community and schools, she adds). So even though she loved art from an early age and developed real ability as a young teenage illustrator, she had a hard time imagining herself becoming a professional. But in fact those possibilities do exist. That’s why Lin and her good friend Krosoczka, also of Florence, have co-curated a new exhibit at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. “Now & Then: Contemporary Illustrators and their Childhood Art” pairs examples of childhood art and professional work by Lin, Krosoczka and 17 other artists, in some cases showing some notable stylistic connections between the early and later work.

Mississippi received high praise this fall for the state’s results on a national assessment that measures fourth- and eighth-grade students’ proficiency in reading and math. While the rest of the country stagnated or declined in reading proficiency, Mississippi was the only state to see improvement. But before those children ever sit down to take that test, they have to master the foundational principles of reading. This process begins in kindergarten for many students, where teachers work to set students up for success for the rest of their academic lives.

The ASD Nest public school program places students alongside neurotypical students in classrooms led by specially trained teachers. ASD Nest, which is named after its goal of giving kids with ASD a nurturing place to learn and grow, is a collaboration between the New York City Department of Education and NYU. It launched in 2003 with four teachers and has since expanded to 54 elementary, middle, and high schools in New York City. ASD Nest places two certified and specially trained teachers in each participating classroom, which allows one of them to provide one-on-one social, emotional, or academic support whenever the need arises, without disrupting the lesson or pulling a student out of the classroom. On top of that, each classroom’s two co-teachers meet weekly with occupational, speech, and physical therapists to discuss each student’s progress and share observations about what’s working and what isn’t.

Education Week’s most-read special education stories of 2019 examined the past and future of special education, the aftermath of the lead crisis in Flint, Mich., teachers’ lack of confidence in their abilities to meet the needs of special education students, and how ‘twice-exceptional’ students are often overlooked in gifted education.

To talk about the lessons we can learn from Valley Stream 30 (episode #6), Ed Trust brought together Jeffrey Howard, founder of The Efficacy Institute, Natalie Wexler, author of The Knowledge Gap, and Josh Anisansel, a Long Island school administrator who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Valley Stream 30. In a wide-ranging conversation moderated by podcast creator Karin Chenoweth, Josh Anisansel described Nassau County as highly segregated with tremendous inequities. Jeff Howard responded that these kinds of inequities are deeply woven into American society but that schools and districts that are fully mobilized are able to operate as if they didn’t exist. “Educators who get this right…reach a kind of state of grace where they come to a firm conclusion that there ain’t nothing wrong with these kids. These kids can learn at the highest levels.” Natalie Wexler argued that all children need a carefully sequenced curriculum that builds knowledge systematically both to help children learn about the world and ensure that they can read at high levels. Panelists grappled with whether programs and curricula are more important or the beliefs and systems educators bring to the enterprise and worked through a number of related issues.

Betsy Bird —collection development manager at Evanston (IL) Public Library— completed an end-of-year marathon on her blog, “A Fuse #8 Production. IIn what has become an annual tradition, Birdposts a booklist a day in December, representing her accounting of the year in children’s literature, in categories ranging from American history and funny books to picture book readalouds and comics and graphic novels.

The huge and largely unreported story is that American educators are trained to believe in ideas and methods that have little or no evidence behind them—and often conflict with what scientists have discovered about the learning process. Classroom materials rest on similarly flawed assumptions. The disjunction between evidence and practice makes it unnecessarily difficult for teachers to do their jobs and for all but the ablest and most advantaged students to learn. The glimmer of hope is that a growing number of teachers—along with some administrators, policymakers, philanthropists, and parents—are beginning to push for change. The leading edge of this movement has focused on reading, and primarily on the aspect of reading commonly known as phonics. The same goes for the other aspect of reading, comprehension. Teachers spend hours every week believing they’re teaching comprehension “skills” –think “finding the main idea”—when in fact they’re wasting precious time. As cognitive science has demonstrated, comprehension depends far more on how much you know about the topic than on generally applicable “skill.” This is an even more complex and insidious problem than phonics—and it’s not just about “reading.” It’s woven through the entire K-12 system, not just early grades. And the solution—switching to a curriculum and instructional approach that builds kids’ knowledge directly and explicitly, beginning in kindergarten, instead of focusing on illusory skills—flies in the face of what teachers have been told about how learning works.

This op-ed is part of a series of reflections on the past decade in education technology. Chip Donohue is the founding director of the Technology in Early Child Center at Erikson Institute, and a senior fellow at the Fred Rogers Center. As I reflect on the intersection of child development, early learning and technology over the past 10 years, I am reminded of a decade of polarizing arguments for and against young children using technology. In particular, I remain discouraged by 10 years of continuing debates about screen time that miss the importance of content and context in determining what uses of technology are beneficial for young children. My work has focused on always putting the child before the technology, identifying what we have learned while acknowledging what we still need to understand, and balancing the benefits while embracing concerns about children’s health and well-being in the digital age.

Valley Stream 30 is just over the Nassau County line from Queens, New York, and has attracted a diverse population of African Americans, Hispanics, and relatively new immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. It is in many ways a classic “white flight” district. Twenty years ago, 40 percent of the elementary school district was white. Today, only 5 percent. Superintendent Nicholas Stirling says that the fact that the district “celebrates” its diversity and sees it as a strength has allowed it to build the systems that support excellence and continual improvement. One of the things its diversity forces educators to think about is the wide diversity of background knowledge students bring to lessons. In this ExtraOrdinary Districts podcast, listeners will hear how, in addition to their careful attention to instruction, Valley Stream 30 educators have built system after system to support the learning of the adults in the system.

The students in Sharon George’s class are all refugees. Mariam came to the United States from Sudan. Her classmates are from Somalia, Syria, Burundi and Nepal. They have chosen this school, Fugees Academy in Columbus, OH, for its explicit focus on serving young refugee students and helping them through high school and into college. Fugees Academy is perhaps the only school in the nation to enroll refugee students exclusively. It was founded on the belief that these learners need more focused attention than they often receive in traditional public schools, and that they need to go back to basics to learn English. Fugees (its name is a play on “refugees”) tries to squeeze in many of the elements of a K-8 curriculum into three years of middle school, helping students learn two to three years of the English language in one. The school also places an emphasis on helping students overcome trauma they may have faced on their journey to the United States.

Sixth grader Andre Turner leaned up against a wall-size mural of the new reading center at Confluence Academy-Old North. His head rested on the “B” about a foot taller than him that helped to form the word “Believe.” When his fellow students return from winter break, they will get to experience a quiet, relaxing reading room filled with black children’s literature and comfortable seating. The new reading room is part of the Believe Project, which is the brainchild of Julius B. Anthony, founder of the St. Louis Black Authors and Children Literature. “About 90 percent of the black children in public education in our region are attending a school in the Promise Zone communities,” Anthony said. “This is part of a Promise Zone community, and we really want to make sure that wherever we go we are supporting the work that was there and helping children fall in love with reading. That’s what this is all about.”

Creating a supportive and inclusive school culture for students with disabilities can be a tall task for principals—especially those without backgrounds in special education. To help more principals reach that goal, two research and advocacy groups for students with disabilities, the National Center for Learning Disabilities and Understood.org, have compiled a guide to deepen principals’ understanding of the most effective practices for educating students with disabilities—and help support classroom teaching that best serves those students.

Podcast episodes by APM Reports have raised questions about materials for teaching reading that are widely used in American schools. An author of those materials, Lucy Calkins, recently fired back at “phonics-centric people.” Calkins was one of several powerful people and organizations to weigh in on the debate about how to teach reading in the past few weeks. Senior education correspondent Emily Hanford’s work on the science of reading has helped spark a national conversation. There’s been lively discussion on social media and at education conferences. And many teachers and education officials say they are changing their approach to reading instruction. However not everyone is happy with the direction things are going.

In the courtyard of David Starr Jordan Senior High School, a Title 1 school in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, teens arranged some 600 new books on folding tables, library book carts, and wooden bookshelves inside a parked bookmobile. The teenagers were volunteering with the Book Truck, a peer-to-peer literacy nonprofit. The traveling bookmobile gives away high-demand YA titles to teens who are in foster care, experiencing homelessness, or come from low-income families. The volunteers wore name tags and were ready to help classmates choose two free books.

Children will better understand the work we’re asking them to do if they see examples of that work created by their classmates. Displaying students’ work and integrating it into lessons is also a powerful way to build motivation. That’s critical, especially if you’re a teacher who tries to minimize your use of external punishments and rewards. Researchers like Dan Ariely and Daniel Pink have revealed how deeply our work and our motivation are intertwined. When we have the opportunity to create work that matters to us, we don’t need as many external motivators like material rewards or even praise.

Education has many critical issues; although if you watch the nightly news or 24/7 news channels, you will most likely see very little when it comes to education. It sometimes make me wonder how much education is valued? Every year around this time, I highlight some critical issues facing education. These issues are not ranked in order of importance. I actually developed a list of about 20 critical issues but wanted to narrow it down to 12. They range from issues that impact our lives in negative ways to issues that impact our lives in positive ways, and I wanted to provide a list of issues I feel educators will believe are in their control. I have spent the better part of 2019 on the road traveling across the U.S., Canada, Europe, the U.K., and Australia. The issues that are highlighted below have come up in most of those countries, but they will be particularly important for those of us living in the U.S.

Dixie Amy coaches and cajoles her three students, a fifth-grader and two second-graders. She watches a timer and counts the words as her students read aloud. For most of the school day, Amy is the receptionist at Grand View Elementary School. But every afternoon, the former paraprofessional leads drills in fluency, or reading speed. She volunteered for the task, and the training for it. At Grand View, reading instruction is an all-hands-on-deck project. Last spring, 80 percent of its K-3 students read at grade level — more than 10 percentage points above the state average. Some of Idaho’s reading success stories are unfolding in remote, rural schools such as Grand View. Scores are improving significantly. Student growth far exceeds the statewide rate. Here is how four districts and one charter school are doing it, and what other schools can learn from them.

New results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an exam given to teenagers around the world every three years, revealed that reading scores among U.S. 15-year-olds have remained stagnant over the past two decades and the gap between high and low performers has widened. The announcement came on the heels of reports from the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which showed that only 35 percent of fourth graders and 34 percent of eighth graders scored at or above the proficient level in reading. Together, these results have prompted a flurry of questions about the effectiveness of current approaches to teaching kids how to read. Rebecca Silverman, an associate professor of education at Stanford Graduate School of Education, studies literacy development and instruction among pre-K and elementary school children. Silverman weighs in on the ongoing debate in teaching literacy, why she believes schools should take a more targeted approach and what it will take to make that possible.

The Program for International Student Assessment, a test designed to evaluate education standards around the globe, determined that American students have stagnated in reading and math performance since 2000. The disappointing news comes after years of bipartisan efforts to overhaul the U.S. education system. Why are students from one of the richest countries in the world performing relatively poorly on this exam? And what can be done to move America’s education system forward? Guests include Natalie Wexler, Education reporter, author of “The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System–and How to Fix It.”

What should after-school programs be doing — especially when working with struggling readers? Louisa Moats calls the lack of effective reading instruction a national scandal “for decades.” Moats is a retired researcher, psychologist and writer who was the site director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Early Interventions Project in Washington, D.C. “We know what to do — let’s do it,” she said. When after-school programs seek to help children in reading, they, too, should call upon what has been shown to work. “I would advocate for more after-school programs to try to adopt one of the proven voluntary tutorial programs,” Moats said. A 2017 report from Research for Action, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit organization, looked at existing research on out-of-school time literacy efforts. The report, “Supporting Literacy in Out-of-School Time,” was funded by the William Penn Foundation.

Author and illustrator Mo Willems has sold millions of children’s books and created beloved characters, including the Pigeon, Knuffle Bunny, and Elephant and Piggie. Now he’s the Kennedy Center’s first education artist-in-residence, making new kinds of work for both kids and adults. Correspondent Paul Solman talks to Willems about how he engages his audience.

Education and mainstream media have focused on gaps in teachers’ knowledge of the settled science of reading development, as well as the widespread implementation of popular but disproven and ineffectual instructional approaches for teaching reading. Teachers, however, do not work in a vacuum. Collectively and individually, they seldom have the autonomy or the authority to implement significant changes to ineffective district-mandated reading assessments and curricula. Moreover, teacher evaluations are often linked to their fidelity to implementation of these curricula. Although research has found that instructional leadership is the second most important school-related factor contributing to what students learn in school (after classroom instruction), the role of school and district leaders in perpetuating these poor reading outcomes has been largely overlooked. As the demands for teachers to demonstrate knowledge of the science of reading increase, are there similar requirements for those who lead them? Would the school, district, and state educational leaders in your community be able to demonstrate knowledge of the science of reading?

From birth to age three, more than a million neural connections are created every second. The experiences young children have, or don’t have, during this period shape brain architecture and form 90 percent of the adult brain by age five. Simple motor tasks can also be brain-building activities. A motion as seemingly straightforward as crossing the midline—an imaginary vertical line separating the left and right sides of one’s body—can create new brain pathways in very young children, building the foundation for the development of cognitive skills such as reading and writing. That’s why Julie Jackson, youth services supervisor at the Kathryn Linnemann Branch of the St. Charles City-County (MO) Library, encourages kids to bring their arms across their bodies while she does a dance with shakers during her “Time for Twos” storytime sessions. Many storytime activities also develop executive function skills, which help us self-regulate, filter distractions, remember important information, and multitask.

In November, the California Department of Education (CDE) was awarded a $37.5 million federal Comprehensive Literacy State Development grant which will allow for the expansion of current literacy efforts statewide over the next five years.“Many of the students who are struggling with reading comprehension or are not reading at grade level are our most vulnerable students—economically disadvantaged students, English language learners, students with disabilities, and students in rural communities,” said California superintendent of public instruction Tony Thurmond. “This grant will allow us to promote and support equitable access to high-quality literacy instruction that will benefit not only our high-need students but all of our students from pre-K to high school.” The grant has three objectives: build state capacity to support literacy instruction, develop and implement a comprehensive state literacy plan, and build local capacity to establish, align, and implement literacy initiatives.

“AGAIN!!!” That request/demand will be familiar to any parent — kids hardly ever want to read a book just once. So we asked Matt de la Peña, Newbery medal-winning children’s author (and dad), to recommend books that stand up, reading, after reading, after reading, after reading … The good news is, there are a lot of great books out there. “We’re in a golden age of picture books,” says de la Peña. “There are books tackling so many different subjects that were never explored in the past.” It’s a great time to be making kids’ books, de la Peña says, and a great time to be reading them: “There are more creators who have been let into the door and that just gives the picture book arena so many more options, so many new voices … I think when you get more diverse creators, you’re going to get more quality stories,” he explains. Here’s de la Peña describing some of his favorite books.

There’s been a welcome surge of public discussion of the science on reading. But if we want all kids to become good readers, media coverage needs to point out that current practice conflicts with it. What scientists have discovered, however, is that “skills” are far less important to comprehension than the amount of knowledge the reader has about the topic. What works best is to build knowledge through a coherent curriculum that is implemented across grade levels, beginning in kindergarten. If the media doesn’t balance its incisive coverage of phonics with a more illuminating treatment of comprehension, I’m afraid we’ll end up repeating the vicious cycles of the past. If the pendulum swings back in the direction of phonics without a simultaneous change in the way we approach comprehension, many kids will learn to decode words but—especially as they reach higher grade levels, where assumptions about background knowledge increase—they won’t understand what they’re reading.

It all started with a big, controversial bet that young kids could actually learn from television. In its inaugural seasons, episodes dedicated to the letter n or the number 5 reflected the zeal of its educational mission and its laser-like focus on pedagogy. But from the moment it was first conceived in a 1967 report presented by its founder, Joan Ganz Cooney, Sesame Street quietly harbored larger ambitions.Born at the tail end of the 1960s, Sesame Street evoked a world that was grounded in a radical, even utopian, vision. The show was big-city urban, gritty, unafraid of controversy, sometimes psychedelic, and most alarmingly to some of its earliest viewers, racially integrated—and proud of it. The original target audience, reported The New York Times, was a “4-year-old, inner-city, black youngster,” and in between its charming, mainstream skits on literacy and numeracy, Sesame Street felt by turns avant-garde, iconoclastic, and revolutionary. Now in its 50th year, Sesame Street has remained astonishingly, resolutely inclusive. Long before the issues were addressed candidly on adult TV, Sesame Street was tackling racism, home eviction, neurodiversity, and disability with its audience of toddlers.

Andrew Clements, who mined a brief career as a teacher in Illinois in writing two dozen books for young readers, most notably “Frindle,” which sold more than eight million copies, died on Nov. 28 at his home in West Baldwin, Maine. He was 70. “Frindle” tells the story of Nicholas, a mischievous boy who bedevils his fifth-grade teacher by persuading all his classmates to refer to a pen as a frindle. Mr. Clements’s books have been praised for their portrayal of the dynamics between students and teachers, the intricacies of classroom and schoolyard culture and the breadth of adult’s as well as children’s emotions.

Lately the Caldecott Medal has begun to show its age for reasons that cannot be written off to the vagaries of time or taste. Today, in fact, the world’s very first prize for children’s book illustration is in urgent need of a makeover: The outdated rule that candidates must be American needs to go. Today, the children’s publishing industry is a global enterprise. Picture books are as ubiquitous an American export as iPhones and soybeans. At the same time, spurred by the rise of the internet, the ease of long-distance travel and a belated recognition of the value for American children of a cross-cultural perspective, American publishers have become increasingly open to working with authors and illustrators from abroad and to introducing books that originated elsewhere. With artists from France, Italy, Spain, England, Poland, South Korea, Japan, China, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia and Canada well represented on publishers’ lists, the time has surely come for the Caldecott Medal to drop the ban on illustrators who aren’t citizens or residents of the United States.

The most practical approach for schools and districts that wish to take a knowledge-building approach to literacy is adopting one of the few published curricula explicitly designed to build knowledge, such as Core Knowledge, Wit & Wisdom, or EL Education. While such programs do not necessarily align within a grade level to the science and social studies being taught in each state, these curricula do tend to align vertically from one grade level to the next. And all promote thoughtful knowledge-building through reading complex, grade-level texts. States could play a critical role in supporting students’ knowledge-building. Here’s how. First, states could look across their academic standards and build a “knowledge map” of the big topics students are expected to learn in each grade level across content areas.

Almost all American teachers supplement their core curriculum (if they even have one) with materials they gather from the internet. National surveys show that supplementation is a growing phenomenon, and that many teachers use supplementary materials in large proportions of their lessons. While we know that supplementation is widespread, and we have a good handle on what websites teachers rely on, we don’t really know what kinds of materials teachers seek out and whether they are any good. A new study looked at the quality of more than 300 of the most-downloaded high school English language arts (ELA) materials on three popular websites: TeachersPayTeachers, ShareMyLesson, and ReadWriteThink. The reviewers built a rubric to measure the quality of the materials along multiple dimensions, and we recruited ELA experts to help evaluate the materials. The report, “The Supplemental Curriculum Bazaar: Is What’s Online Any Good?” is published today. Here’s what they learned.

1919 was an explosive year in American history: molasses flooded the town of Boston; women fought for the right to vote; lynchings of African Americans led to the birth of the civil rights movement; the World Series experienced a shocking scandal. Martin W. Sandler is known for his excellent work in documenting the history of America. This November, the award-winning author earned the 2019 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for 1919: The Year That Changed America. SLJ spoke to him about his newly bestowed honor, his creative inspiration, and his research process.

On a daily basis, every teacher navigates a wealth of questions about words and about the world. The English dictionary is replete with over half a million words, and many of our pupils can struggle to stay afloat as they swim in this sea of academic language. Given the sheer breadth and depth of vocabulary of the English language—alongside how critical it proves in mediating the academic curriculum of school—it is crucial that every teacher has a confident understanding of teaching vocabulary in the classroom. We cannot teach all of the words to our pupils. Their language develops daily, inside and outside of the school gates, with reading, talk and simply existing in the world, seeing their vocabulary grow exponentially. And yet, we can better develop our pupils’ vocabulary, identify their gaps in understanding, and teach new words with a greater likelihood of success.

I am a cognitive psychologist, which means that I use science to study mental processes. Cognitive psychologists interested in the science of learning take the basic building blocks of cognitive processes—how people perceive, learn, attend to and remember information—and build teaching and learning strategies that can be tested using the scientific method. Cognitive psychologists interested in the science of learning use the laboratory-to-classroom model to conduct research. Research in my field is powerful for educators because it yields insight about what causes students to learn. That understanding allows teachers and administrators to apply evidence-based teaching and learning strategies flexibly in the classroom.

During winter, I start thinking ahead to summer. Those of us who work in public libraries, specifically youth services, know that summer is our busiest time of the year. School is out, and we have reading clubs to run and extra programming to offer. We’re also aware that some of our young patrons spend the entire day at the library while their parents work, and that, over the course of the day, they may fill themselves up on candy—or nothing at all. For this reason, many U.S. libraries, including my employer, Uniondale (NY) Public Library (UPL), have partnered with food banks to provide healthy summer meals in a safe, supervised setting for young people up to age 18. Uniondale is a diverse community, and the majority of our patrons are African American, West Indian, and Hispanic. My wonderful coworkers, who hail from around the globe, volunteered to showcase their own cultures during Multicultural Storytimes. These events were filled with songs, stories, artifacts, games, and dancing.

The plan was hatched with high hopes and missionary zeal: For the first time in its history, the United States would come together to create consistent, rigorous education standards and stop letting so many school children fall behind academically. More than 40 states signed on to the plan, known as the Common Core State Standards Initiative, after it was rolled out in 2010 by a bipartisan group of governors, education experts and philanthropists. American children would read more nonfiction, write better essays and understand key mathematical concepts, instead of just mechanically solving equations. A decade later, after years full of foment in American schools, the performance of American students remains stagnant on the global and national exams that advocates often cited when making the case for the Common Core. The disappointing results have prompted many in the education world to take stock of the Common Core, one of the most ambitious education reform projects in American history. Some see the effort as a failure, while others say it is too soon to judge the program, whose principles are still being rolled out at the classroom level.

Before coming to the public school, I’d spent a couple years working at a tutoring center that taught, among other things, an intensive phonics program to students with reading difficulties. I’d had dozens of hours of training in several different research-based reading programs, and taught close to 100 students how to read. At the time, I figured most early-reading teachers had, at some point, had similar cognitive science-based training. But as results from two new nationally representative surveys show, that’s not the case. In preparing this reporting series, the Education Week Research Center surveyed about 670 K-2 and special education teachers and 530 education professors who teach reading courses. The findings—among the first to look at teacher and teacher-educator knowledge and practices in early reading across the country—tell an illuminating story about what’s happening in classrooms, including what teachers do and don’t know about reading and where they learned it.

Ashley Bryan has been making children’s books for almost 60 years. In 1962, he was the first African American to publish a children’s book as an author and illustrator. He was also a pioneer in creating stories centered on children about African and African American history and culture. Bryan has worked on about 50 books, including illustrating books by poet Nikki Giovanni and novelist Richard Wright. He has won the Newbery Honor, the Coretta Scott King award, and the Hans Christian Andersen award. Bryan’s passionate life and wide-ranging interests are collected in his papers. When it came time for the Ashley Bryan Center to find an appropriate repository for the archive, they looked near and far.

This year on their Best Books for Kids list, New York Public Library included a section that was just “En espanol.” It got me to thinking. On 31 Days, 31 Lists I always include a day of celebration for “bilingual books”. What do I mean by that? Well, either these are books that were originally in English and were translated to another language, or they feature both English and another language in their text.

Seaford, Delaware, was the “Nylon Capital of the World” until DuPont closed its plant. Today it has twice the rate of poverty as the rest of the state. For years, three of its four elementary schools were among the lowest performing in the state. But Stanford education professor Sean Reardon identified it as a district where African American students were learning at a faster rate than white students. That turned out to be a harbinger of enormous improvement, ushered in by superintendent Dave Perrington who assembled a team of administrators committed to equity and excellence. They brought a new approach to reading instruction and to the use of data to drive improvement. This podcast brings you the voices of Perrington, principals, teachers, and the researcher who developed their reading program, Bookworms. Where once Seaford was one of the lowest performing districts in Delaware, it now matches its performance, and its third-graders are way outperforming the state. In a diverse district that serves African American and white students and the children of relatively new immigrants from Haiti and Central America, the schools are forging a path to excellence.

In Central New York, there appears to be one shining example where systematic phonics and other proven methods are being used to teach reading with astonishing results. In the Lyncourt Union Free School District, they knew they had to do something to improve student reading proficiency in the district. Lyncourt turned to The Reading League, a non-profit organization that works to fundamentally change the way our children learn to read. They took the training into the classroom, and in just two years, from 2017 to 2019, in grades two through six, Lyncourt has seen a 31% increase in students who are reading at or above grade-level expectations and 70% of all students in those grades are now reading at or above proficiency. This 2018 to 2019 comparison shows that out of 18 school districts in Onondaga County, Lyncourt tied for first place for the largest increase in grades third through eighth ELA proficiency as measured by state testing.

Already troubled by her 4th grade students’ low reading levels, San Antonio-area teacher Melody Fernandez entered “survival mode” when she was moved down to 1st grade—and discovered the full scope of what she and many of her elementary colleagues were not prepared to teach. She had learned a lot in her preparation about reading theories, but no specific protocols for teaching the subject. So she did what many teachers new to a grade do. She used the methods more seasoned colleagues told her to use, and the curriculum on hand, which relied on leveled picture books with easily memorized, repetitive sentence structures. In all that’s been written about early literacy, little attention has been given to the cultural factors that influence how such practices are learned, reinforced, and transmitted. Yet sociology plays a major role in why they linger on in classrooms—despite evidence that they can hinder young readers’ ability to crack the code.

On every schoolyard across the world you will find games invented by children. Hand-clapping routines, rhyming stanzas and intricate rules for tiny competitions; games born of the creativity, insight and idiosyncrasy of children’s minds. In New York City’s diverse playgrounds, kids play games in Haitian Creole, Korean, Spanish, Arabic and Polish, just to name a few. Unlike nursery rhymes, lullabies, or children’s songs these games are conceived of, built upon and passed along by kids, largely by girls. Irene Chagal, who researched the history and spread of hand-clapping games for her documentary “Let’s Get the Rhythm: The Life and Times of Miss Mary Mack,” describes these games as “playground lore,” a rich body of folk literature that is just outside the attention of most adults.

Shared reading between parents and very young children, including infants, is associated with stronger vocabulary skills for nearly all children by age 3, say physicians at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. According to research published in The Journal of Pediatrics, this is true also for children who genetically may be vulnerable to barriers in learning, attention and behavior development. “In a supportive environment, children who may be genetically at-risk, do just as well as their peers,” said Manuel Jimenez, a developmental pediatrician and assistant professor of pediatrics and family medicine and community health at the medical school, who is lead author of the study.

New results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a standardized test given every two years to measure fourth- and eighth-grade achievement in reading and math, show that Mississippi made more progress than any other state. There’s no way to know for sure what causes increases in test scores, but Mississippi has been doing something notable: making sure all of its teachers understand the science of reading. To understand what the science says, a good place to start is with something called the “simple view of reading.” The simple view says that reading comprehension is the product of two things: one is your ability to decode words and the other is your ability to understand spoken language. The simple view clearly shows that focusing only on decoding would be a mistake because that’s only half the equation. Reading instruction has to include language comprehension, too. This means lessons and activities that expand children’s oral vocabularies and knowledge, so they know the meaning of the words they can decode.

Many teachers likely did not learn the cognitive science behind reading in their teacher preparation programs. While decades of research have shown that teaching young students how to crack the code of written language through systematic phonics is the most reliable way to make sure that they learn how to read words, that approach to reading has not made its way into many preservice programs. Balanced literacy dominates the nation’s colleges of education. In an Education Week Research Center survey of more than 530 professors of reading instruction, just 22 percent said their philosophy of teaching early reading centered on explicit, systematic phonics with comprehension as a separate focus. Many proponents of systematic phonics are hopeful that the tide is slowly turning—that as states pass legislation requiring teachers to be trained in the science of reading, and as school districts begin to consider teachers’ knowledge of brain-based reading principles when hiring, colleges of education will be forced to get on board.