Today’s Literacy Headlines

New brain imaging research debunks a controversial theory about dyslexia that can impact how it is sometimes treated. The cerebellum, a brain structure traditionally considered to be involved in motor function, has been implicated in the reading disability, developmental dyslexia, however, this ‘cerebellar deficit hypothesis’ has always been controversial. The new research shows that the cerebellum is not engaged during reading in typical readers and does not differ in children who have dyslexia.

Here are the articles I have written as both a librarian and the mother of a child with dyslexia in which I share my personal journey of learning how to better understand, advocate for and help my child with dyslexia. Every day I’m learning more about how to better understand and help my child and children like her. I hope you will join me on this journey because if we want to raise readers, we need to understand that not everyone learns to read in the same way and at the same time. And if I could say one important thing to you it is this: never ever shame a person on their reading journey, no matter where they are at, what they are reading, or how it may differ from yours.

Does it actually help children to learn new words if those words are taught with their spelling patterns? Some time ago, Linnea Ehri and Lee Wilce published the finding that presenting beginning readers with spellings helped them to learn how to pronounce new words. But I was interested in whether this transferred to vocabulary learning more broadly, to the learning of not only new labels, but also what they mean. When we tested this idea, we found that children did indeed learn vocabulary items more readily when they were taught with their spelling patterns. We call this strategy “orthographic facilitation”, as having access to the orthography, or printed form, of a word seems to facilitate vocabulary learning. If we want to narrow the word gap at school entry, then drawing on early letter-sound knowledge (phonics) may well be an important strategy.

The dismissal bell rings at Latimer Middle School and sixth graders spring from their classrooms. We can all imagine the scene: crowded corridors, lockers flung open and shut, a skateboarder weaving past, kids gathering on benches outside, school buses lined up and a teacher at the door to “tell everyone what not to do.” At the corner a crossing guard waits in the same place every day. But in the very first lines of LOOK BOTH WAYS: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks, Jason Reynolds’s inspired new novel for middle-grade readers — a National Book Award finalist — we’re reminded to take a closer look. “This story was going to begin … With a school bus falling from the sky. But no one saw it happen. No one heard anything.” For young readers, the structure of this “tale told in 10 blocks” is bound to be deeply satisfying, a way to zoom in on the everyday mysteries of this neighborhood.

Some of the most important pre-literacy skills begin in infancy. This timeline shows examples of the milestones children meet on their path to fluent reading.

Homework is a hot-button issue for both parents and teachers. When we asked the MindShift audience about it, we got a wide range of thoughtful answers. And the results of our poll were pretty evenly split, although the “No’s” have it by a small margin. There was a pretty clear consensus among educators and parents that homework is not appropriate in elementary school. And research supports this perspective – homework in the early years doesn’t do a lot to improve achievement. However, some argue that the goal of giving students some light assignments is to start building a habit around responsibly doing work at home. Many elementary teachers responded that reading at home should be the only homework. And research on reading supports this approach. When reading becomes a habit, kids are more likely to enjoy reading and that has all kinds of positive benefits.

The Every Student Succeeds Act aims to close opportunity gaps for English-language learners—but reaching that goal will require more collaboration between educators, scholars, and policymakers, a leading English-language-learner researcher argues. The groups must work together to ensure that English-proficiency standards are used in classrooms in a “conceptually sound and practically feasible manner,” argues Okhee Lee, an education professor at New York University and a well-known expert on English-learners and science, in a new policy paper published in Educational Researcher. Lee writes that aligning English-proficiency standards with content standards, in English, mathematics, and science, has proved difficult because of a “lack of communication and collaboration” between researchers who focus on English-learners and those who specialize in those content areas. ESSA content standards call for all students, including English-learners, to engage in academically rigorous and language-intensive learning, such as arguing from evidence and constructing explanations.

Texts have tremendous power in our lives; they open realms, spark and extend interests, and add to our understanding of the world we live in. In order to tap into all of that information, get lost in those stories, explore the ideas of poets and dig deep into their curiosities, our kids must see themselves as readers. Very young children don’t pick up a book and think, “Oh, I should learn to read.” On the other hand, I don’t think they pick up a book and think, “Reading is hard/stupid/a waste of time.” As pre-readers, they grab a book because they have an interest in it—the cover, the memory of it being read to them, the pictures. In the case of some of the latest board books, children may simply be drawn to the textures added on each page. At that point, children are intrigued, curious, and wanting to explore. What happens, then, as the years go by and they come to believe that reading is a skill beyond their grasp or a challenge they may never conquer? With some kids, once their confidence gets rocked, it can be difficult to recover.

Kindergarten should not merely establish a springboard for success in upper grades. It is also the developmental foundation for mastery of content that is the focus of elementary, middle and high school. More K-12 schools are emphasizing the noncognitive skills that students can access throughout their schooling and careers. There is good reason to make this investment. But just as recognition is growing that these skills matter, our youngest students are losing out on opportunities to practice and hone such skills. As the white paper “Taking Back Kindergarten: Rethinking Rigor for Young Learners” discusses, a rigorous approach to kindergarten does not have to be at odds with developmentally appropriate education. Fusing academic and social development can create a remarkably rich kindergarten classroom. Rather than rows of students working quietly on practice worksheets or listening to the teacher speak, developmentally appropriate kindergarten classrooms are filled with children engaged in activities that match with their learning content.

Finalists in five categories for the 2019 National Book Awards were announced today by the National Book Foundation. Find out the finalists in the Young People’s Literature category. The winners will be announced on Wednesday, November 20, at the 70th National Book Awards ceremony in New York City, hosted by LeVar Burton.

Research has shown that reading is not a natural process, and it’s not a guessing game. Written language is a code. Certain combinations of letters predictably represent certain sounds. And for the last few decades, the research has been clear: Teaching young kids how to crack the code—teaching systematic phonics—is the most reliable way to make sure that they learn how to read words. Of course, there is more to reading than seeing a word on a page and pronouncing it out loud. As such, there is more to teaching reading than just teaching phonics. Reading requires children to make meaning out of print. They need to know the different sounds in spoken language and be able to connect those sounds to written letters in order to decipher words. They need deep background and vocabulary knowledge so that they understand the words they read. Eventually, they need to be able to recognize most words automatically and read connected text fluently, attending to grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has just issued a report on what pediatricians can — and should — do to help “school-aged children who are not progressing academically.” Dr. Arthur Lavin, one of the lead authors of the report and the chairman of the A.A.P. committee on the psychosocial aspects of child and family health, said that pediatricians can play an important role in working with children who are struggling in school. He does so in his own practice in the Cleveland area and said it has emerged as a high priority among his patients because it is so common. What the report means, he said, is that the A.A.P. is setting a standard for the care of the child not doing well in school, and that the issue deserves the same attention as any other complex problem getting in a child’s way. The pediatrician should make sure the problem is properly investigated and the cause is found, though much of the specific testing and treatment will be done by others.

Georgia will have an additional $179.2 million to spend on improving reading in public schools over the next half decade after winning another literacy grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The federal Comprehensive Literacy State Development Grant builds on prior awards to Georgia. In 2016, the state won $61.5 million. In 2011, Georgia won $25.7 million in what was then called the Striving Readers program. Some local educators have seen gains in literacy scores after using the money to buy reading-focused tests and curriculum for younger students. Early literacy has become a focus of the state’s top leaders. During the last legislation session, lawmakers mandated screening for dyslexia and pushed for changes in teacher literacy training.

In many preschool classrooms in the U.S., children are asked to do little more than identify shapes and letters and sit quietly on rugs during story time. But a growing body of research is overturning assumptions about what early education can look like. When children learn certain skills, such as the ability to focus attention—skills that emerge when teachers employ games and conversations that prompt kids to think about what they are doing—the children do better socially and academically for years afterward. A study published last year, which tracked kids for a decade starting in preschool, found some evidence that children with teachers trained to foster such abilities may get better grades compared with children who did not get this type of education.

Catherine Drennan describes herself as insatiably curious, a trait she credits to her parents. Drennan was excited when it came time to start school. But when she got to first grade, she hit a major stumbling block. Drennan couldn’t make sense of the reading exercises the class was doing. She compares those pages full of words to a code that she couldn’t figure out how to crack. Drennan was eventually placed in the lowest reading level in her grade, a designation that felt extremely embarrassing. “I was someone who was so in love with learning but learning was not in love with me,” she says. Eventually, Drennan was diagnosed with dyslexia. At the time, in the 1970s, scientists and educators didn’t know a lot about the diagnosis and there was little in the way of advice for kids like her on how to find other ways to decode the written word.

There have already been some fantastic new book titles for grade-school children in 2019—and we have several months to go. From adventures to family dramas, from silly tales to scary stories, here’s a selection of some of the best literary releases for children of the year so far—some of which may well become treasures and classics of the future.

Neuroscience has evolved tremendously in recent decades. What was once based on inference can now be scientifically investigated using brain imaging and the power of computational science. As a result of these advancements, pioneering scientists have filled the gap in understanding how parent or caregiver input impacts the brain, and ultimately a child’s skill formation. They have generated a wealth of evidence that suggests the single most important component to brain development is the relationship between a baby and her caretaker, with parent language at the heart of that relationship. Parent language, it is important to note, refers not just to the words a parent speaks to a child, but also the quality of the parent-child interaction.

A new study shows early reading in any language helps children learn to read English. The study, titled English Reading Growth in Spanish-Speaking Bilingual Students: Moderating Effect of English Proficiency on Cross-Linguistic Influence found that children whose native language is Spanish and had early reading skills in Spanish had greater growth in their ability to read English. The study also found that children who spoke Spanish and had stronger Spanish reading skills in kindergarten performed better across time, and performed stronger than their Spanish-speaking peers who had higher levels of fluency in English but less proficient in reading Spanish. For parents and caretakers, this means that reading to children in any language will impact their future in learning new languages in the future.

The Pew Research Center released its book reading survey results and while reading of print books remains the same among adults, audiobooks are rising in popularity. And those who say that listening to audiobooks is just as good as reading print copies now have some science on their side. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, measured the brain response of nine people while they listened to stories on “The Moth Radio Hour” and as they read the same stories in print. Analyzing the brain scans and data, researchers found “the semantic representations evoked by listening versus reading are almost identical.” The same cognitive and emotional areas of the brain were stimulated, offering further insight into comprehension and a starting point for future studies to better understand the complex process of “word meaning representation.” It shows a larger network of ­regions in the brain with like response to reading and listening than past research.

A recent study concludes that gaps in student test scores are driven by poverty, not race—but then says the solution must nevertheless be racial integration. More fundamentally, it overlooks current classroom practices that perpetuate income-based gaps even when schools are integrated. Earlier this week, Stanford University sociologist Sean Reardon and some colleagues released a report using massive amounts of test-score data to investigate the effects of modern-day racial segregation. After Southern schools were desegregated in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, test-score gaps between black and white students decreased. But with the decline of court-ordered integration, racial segregation in schools returned and has remained at high levels since the 1980s. The question the study set out to investigate is: does racial segregation still matter? The answer, Reardon and his colleagues say, is yes. School systems that are more segregated have larger achievement gaps, and “their gaps grow faster during elementary and middle schools than in less segregated ones.” But it’s not because of race per se. The real problem, the researchers conclude, is poverty.

Assistive technology teachers working at schools in the Fairfax County, VA school district–the 10th largest school district in the U.S.–are finding that the use of audiobooks is improving access to grade-level content while also developing the love of reading that motivates many students to continue improving. Two assistive technology teachers shared their experiences and recommendations during a recent edWebinar. The teachers explained how Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) provides assistive technology support to struggling readers and their teachers, and how the audiobooks in particular are having a very positive impact. As of one of the edWebinar participants recommended, “Don’t wait—accommodate.” FCPS has 30 assistive technology resource teachers, each of whom works with 7 to 10 schools. While at the schools, they coordinate with the special education teachers, speech/language pathologists, and other members of their teams there, and also spend time with individual students and student groups.

There are “no measurable differences” between the performance of charter schools and traditional public schools on national reading and math assessments from 2017, a finding that persists when parents’ educational attainment were factored into the results. That’s one key takeaway from a report released Wednesday by the National Center for Education Statistics about charters, private schools, and home schooling. “School Choice in the United States: 2019 ” also found that Hispanic students constituted a plurality—33 percent—of charter school enrollment in 2016-17, followed by white students at 32 percent and black students at 26 percent. Meanwhile, nearly half of students enrolled at traditional public schools, 49 percent, were white. And a higher share of charter school students were enrolled in “high poverty” schools compared to their traditional public school counterparts, as defined by eligibility for free or reduced-price meals, by a count of 34 to 24 percent. Enrollment in charter schools grew by more than five times between 2000 and 2016.

Caldecott winner Mordicai Gerstein died Tuesday, his publisher, Holiday House, confirmed. “Mordicai Gerstein was a genius, a master of both art and text,” said Grace Maccarone, executive editor at Holiday House. “Mordicai wrote with humor and insight, and he painted with skill and with all his heart. “What was it like to work with him? Thrilling. Especially when he delivered art for I Am Hermes! Mordicai was full of energy, enthusiasm, and goodwill. Gerstein wrote and illustrated many children’s books, including The Boy and the Whale, The Night World, Sleeping Gypsy, and I Am Pan! He won the Caldecott Medal in 2004 for The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, a picture book he wrote and illustrated.

How do preschool services support children to develop language and literacy skills and help them get ready for school? As Research Developments reports, a recent study has explored this question, and helps describe the benefits gained by children who have access to high quality early childhood services. Research shows that phonological awareness skills, in particular phonemic awareness, are important foundational skills for later literacy development. Through their research, and assessment of student phonological awareness skills, Dan Cloney and Kellie Picker say the aim is for children to have fun while playing with and thinking about the words and sounds they’re using in everyday life. They developed a summary of the activities that can be completed with children to see if they can demonstrate various phonological awareness skills.

Could the problem be the nation’s focus on teaching skills rather than actual knowledge? Guests in this interview are: Natalie Wexler, author of “The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System – And How to Fix It” and Sarah Webb, fifth and eighth grade English Language Learner teacher for the Mad River Local School District outside of Dayton, Ohio. She was piloted “Wit and Wisdom,” a content-based curriculum, when she was a fourth grade teacher. She is now helping to implement it districtwide. Wexler says, “…I think what’s less obvious to many educated adults or adults in general is how much some kids don’t know, how much background knowledge and vocabulary they lack about the world. And that’s not true of all kids. Kids who come from better-educated families, who tend to be, in our society, wealthier families, they pick up a lot of knowledge and vocabulary of a sophisticated nature at home. But other kids who are not lucky enough to have highly educated parents really depend on school for that. And if they’re not getting it there, they are going to be falling farther and farther behind their lucky peers every year.”

Staten Island students with dyslexia and language-based learning disabilities were welcomed as “Bridge Builders” when they entered the new Bridge Preparatory Charter School this month. The new charter is the first and only public charter school in New York State dedicated to serving students with dyslexia and language-based learning disabilities. The charter school also admits students who are struggling readers and English Language Learners, who would also benefit from the school’s approach to learning. That structured, research-based and multi-sensory approach to learning is known as Orton-Gillingham. “For kids with dyslexia or language-based learning disabilities, it’s the must-do approach,” said Timothy Castanza, principal and a founder of the charter school. “It’s just good phonics. It’s phonetic awareness because students with dyslexia and language-based learning disabilities – they thrive with structure, this structure-based approach.”

Parents may want to have a few words with their children before sending them off to school. But ideally, they should have millions of words with them before the first day of class. Researchers say that the number of words a child is exposed to in the first four years of life can have big impact on their brain development, language acquisition and school readiness – and that children from disadvantaged backgrounds tend to hear far fewer words than children in higher income families, leaving them less prepared when they get to school. So how can parents know whether their child is hearing enough words? By counting them. Detroit is one of five cities chosen to launch a new program that equips children with special recording devices known as talk pedometers. They work like regular pedometers but instead of counting steps, they count how many words a child hears and speaks during the day. Detroit is the largest city being funded for the program and perhaps the most needy. In Detroit’s public schools, just 11.9% of third-graders were considered proficient at reading, according to state test results.

The stakes for Michigan’s third grade students are high this school year as the retention portion of the state’s “Read by Grade Three” law takes effect in May 2020 after this year’s statewide assessments. Michele Hojnacki has been a third grade teacher for 26 years in Oakland County. Two years of preparations for the retention portion rollout hasn’t reduced the pressure she feels or the volume of work she has to do leading up to the M-STEP. “For (teachers), it has meant in the last two years a lot of record keeping about what we’re doing and a lot of anxiety for parents knowing this is coming up,” she said. “It requires us to do more testing, which is time away from instruction, which is difficult for me, because if we want reading growth, I need to be instructing. All of the record keeping, that is time that could be spent planning for the individual needs of each child.”

One of the fronts in the reading wars debate has been the phonics vs. “whole language,” recently stirred up again by Emily Hanford, who has argued for the full phonics approach in several articles. But that debate feeds into a broader one, an aspect of the conversation might be called skills vs. content. The skills camp views reading as a suite of teachable, transferable skills (making inferences, fluency, decoding), while the content crew leans toward that it is rich content knowledge that makes the whole business of reading work, but which is not transferable (just because I can read a high-level book about dinosaurs doesn’t mean I can also read a high-level book about knitting). The “war” framing can seem awfully overblown to actual classroom teachers. While reading warriors may frame the choices as “either-or,” actual classroom teachers more often think in terms of “how much of this gets used with how much of that.” But the Common Core Standards and the standardized test accountability movement came down heavily on the “suite of skills” side. The skills view lends itself more easily to standardized testing, while content advocates like E. D. Hirsch have declared “There is no such thing as a reading test.”

Programs intended to improve students’ executive function have grown in popularity, but in many cases the hype around so-called “brain training” has outstripped the still-emerging research. A report and rubric released Wednesday by the nonprofit BrainFutures are intended to help district leaders understand different aspects of executive function and evaluate programs intended to support students’ skills. Executive function is the umbrella term for the mental processes involved in self-control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. It’s necessary for a variety of functions, including setting longterm goals and resisting bad habits, reasoning out problems, and adapting to changing circumstances and perspectives. Environmental disadvantages, such as poverty and trauma, have been associated with poorer executive function skills in children. Executive function has been found to be an even better predictor of a student’s academic trajectory than IQ. What’s been less clear is how schools can improve these mental processes.

The wheels are turning at Ferdinand T. Day Elementary in Alexandria. “I’m riding a bike while I’m reading,” said 10-year-old Zekeria Mekonnen. While these fourth graders let their legs do the work on the stationary bikes, the books they were holding took their minds to far away places. “You’re riding but you’re also reading and it’s training your muscles and your brain,” said Ava Walker. “We’re really looking to be creative with how we get kids moving,” said Mike Humphreys, Instructional Specialist for Health, Physical Education and Family Life Education for Alexandria City Public Schools. Ferdinand calls the program Of Pedals and Pages. Students take 15 to 20 minute reading breaks on a bike.

School librarians looking for ideas on how to mark Banned Books Week (Sept. 22–28) can do a quick search on Pinterest and come up with hundreds of examples of elaborate displays to catch a student’s eye. There are books covered in brown paper, “Wanted” posters for frequently challenged books such as The Diary of Anne Frank and the “Captain Underpants” series, along with lots and lots of flames, perhaps to hark back to the days of book burning or to convey a sense of danger surrounding these titles. But do these displays alone do enough to teach students about censorship? Also, how can librarians make sure the Banned Books message isn’t lost or misconstrued? “I think we always have to bring the idea back to our constitutional rights,” says Mary Keeling, president of the American Association of School Librarians. “What’s important about this isn’t the sensationalism of a banned book; the importance is our freedom in a democratic society to listen to and read and think the ideas we want to think. That concept is essential to democratic discourse.”

I’ve whined before about the disappearance of bookmobiles, those branch libraries on wheels that formerly parked in old two-room schoolhouse yards, at churches and community centers. Unfortunately, they’ve disappeared like thick, Sunday newspapers. There’s a substitute for the bookmobile for those who don’t want to buy everything they read. Todd H. Bol used an old garage door to build the first Little Free Library, a library on a stick, 10 years ago in Hudson, Wis. The concept has spread around the globe and there are now 90,000 of them. They’re put up by homeowners usually on the edges of their property. They advise “Take a book, share a book.” Around here, they’re like snowflakes: No two are alike.

A new study of achievement gaps and racial segregation in nearly every school in the United States finds that racial segregation is a very strong predictor of the gaps in academic achievement between white and black or Hispanic students, but it’s school poverty — not the student’s race — that accounts for these big gaps. When the difference in poverty rates between black and white schools is larger, the achievement gaps between black and white students are larger. When the difference in poverty rates between black and white schools is smaller, the achievement gaps are smaller. The two phenomena — racial segregation and economic inequality — are intertwined because students of color are concentrated in high-poverty schools.

They can be identified by their independent-bookstore tote bags, their “Book Lover” mugs, or—most reliably—by the bound, printed stacks of paper they flip through on their lap. They are, for lack of a more specific term, readers. Joining their tribe seems simple enough: Get a book, read it, and voilà! You’re a reader—no tote bag necessary. But behind that simple process is a question of motivation—of why some people grow up to derive great pleasure from reading, while others don’t. That why is consequential—leisure reading has been linked to a range of good academic and professional outcomes—as well as difficult to fully explain. But a chief factor seems to be the household one is born into, and the culture of reading that parents create within it.

Authors Pamela Paul and Maria Russo are parents themselves, as well as editors of The New York Times Book Review, and they draw on their experience in both realms in writing this book. They argue: “School is where children learn that they have to read. Home is where kids learn to read because they want to. It’s where they learn to love to read.” In order to do that, however, parents need to follow some guidelines. Don’t fret about when your child learns to read by himself or herself. (”There is no ‘correct’ age for independent reading and no special formula for getting every child to read by, say, age 5½.”) Hold your tongue when it comes to your child’s reading choices. (”There may be some specific aspect of that book that is speaking to your child. Or maybe he just feels like reading something less obviously challenging at the moment.”) Above all, practice what you preach. (”If you want to raise a reader, be a reader.”) The authors encourage parents to get back to reading themselves if they’ve let that activity slide, and to foster a culture of reading in the home.

There’s bad news for parents who hope their toddler may learn something from a screen while also being entertained for just a few minutes: it’s unlikely to happen. New research shows young children may be fascinated by screens, but they are unable to learn from them even if someone on the screen actively engages with them. The recent research from Vanderbilt University’s Georgene Troseth, an associate professor of psychology, specifically looked at whether toddlers can learn from a video chat. The team found that children in both age groups were able to learn the name of the object and complete the task if someone was in-person and actively responding to the child. The 30 month olds were also able to learn the name even if the in-person adult did not engage with them. But all of the toddlers failed to learn the name or complete the task when, you guessed it, even the most engaging of speakers interacted with them in real time—but from behind a screen. They were also unable to learn from a video chat where the speaker did not engage with them. Troseth said toddlers often can’t learn from screens, even from an interactive video, because they are unable to understand that the person on the screen is real, relevant and represents an actual adult.

Raina Telgemeier is a graphic novelist who writes about the social travails and family dynamics of early adolescence. In her newest book, “Guts,” a series of events propels Raina, already struggling with the sometimes nerve-racking challenges of navigating fourth grade, into a full-blown anxiety disorder, which begins to take over her life. “Guts” captures with remarkable concision and accuracy, and without ever going outside of 10-year-old Raina’s perspective, some of the theoretical concepts and applied techniques that underlie treatment of anxiety. But what will reverberate in the trembling psyches of anxious kids is the recognition that they are not alone in their suffering. Watching Raina endure something like what they may be going through, and then partly triumph over it, provides solace and consolation and possibly hope.

Teachers who headed back to school in the past few weeks are determined to buck the trend and create young readers who perform at grade level. Their goals are laudable, but we have not prepared them well to do this herculean task. The science of learning—an amalgamation of psychology, education, linguistics, and neuroscience—has made enormous progress in our understanding of the factors that go into strong reading competence. Among these are not merely the learning of letter-to-sound correspondences, but also strong language skills that enable children to link the vocabulary they decode into the rich words that infuse the print with meaning. Imagine if all teachers knew about these links and appreciated the twin need to build up language while also helping children navigate code skills. That is, if teachers were equipped with the science, they would be better able to do their jobs of bringing all children into the literate society.

To continue celebrating the new school year, treat your students with humorous twists on these familiar characters and beloved series books – the Pigeon series by Mo Willems and the Harold and Hog series by Dan Santat. Teaching ideas involve a breadth of topics, including breaking down series books, humor, dealing with anxiety, perceptions of school, reader’s theater, and more.

In the average public elementary school, third graders spend nearly two hours a day on reading instruction, according to a recent federal survey. That far outstrips any other subject, with math coming in second at around 70 minutes a day, and science and social studies getting about half an hour a day each. Teachers may think this approach is the best way to improve students’ reading ability. But in her new book “The Knowledge Gap,” journalist Natalie Wexler argues against skimping on science and social studies and emphasizing specific reading skills. She says that this approach, paradoxically, hurts students’ ability to make sense of what they read. She builds her case with cognitive science that suggests that once students have learned to sound out words — “decode” — the key to understanding a text is having solid background knowledge on the subject.

It’s a constant struggle for school districts across the country to find qualified special education teachers. An extra challenge: finding special educators of color to help meet the needs of a student population that can be disproportionately nonwhite. Just over 82 percent of special education teachers in public schools are white, according to 2011-12 federal data, the most recent available. Meanwhile, only about half of students receiving special education services are white, according to 2017-18 data. Yet teacher diversity matters: Decades of research has shown that students often perform better academically when they are taught by teachers of the same race. Jacqueline Rodriguez, the assistant vice president for programs and professional learning at the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, is leading a networked improvement community with 10 teacher-preparation programs that have pledged to find ways to enroll more aspiring special educators and reduce the shortage of special education teachers by fall 2022. A priority is bringing people of color and people with disabilities into the special education teaching ranks.

Reading and riding a bike is not something you would usually do at the same time, but for students at one Pflugerville elementary school, it’s the norm. One librarian’s idea is helping students find the fun in reading. Her name is Jennifer Coleman. She had the idea to install reading desks with bicycle pedals on them. She applied for a school grant and that was enough to buy five desks and those desks are now giving students a whole new outlook on reading.This year, she gained statewide recognition for the idea and received a library innovation award because reading and riding comes with its benefits.

There are at least a few thousand preparation programs attempting to teach future teachers to teach reading. And yet, we have no evidence that any of those programs produce reading instructors who are better (or worse) than any others. If we don’t know the right way to train reading instructors, what if we reduced the regulatory barriers for people to become teachers and let the schools figure it out? In 2016, my Bellwether colleague Ashley LiBetti and I outlined a vision for what that might look like. It would impose fewer barriers to entry to become a teacher but would then rely more heavily on in-service evaluations and supports to boost reading instruction. Although the evidence on most types of teacher professional development continues to underwhelm, there’s a growing body of research suggesting that in-service coaching could be a more promising approach.

Amid today’s advanced technologies, the humble text message is offering new promise for closing gaps in achievement among students — by targeting the behavior of their parents. Informed by science, several new texting programs have helped parents and caregivers develop habits at home that best help kids succeed. Well-timed, well-crafted text messages to parents have led to an uptick in reading to toddlers and an increase in Head Start enrollment and attendance, studies show. At the high school level, they’ve led to teens skipping fewer classes, completing more homework and earning higher grades. Last year, the Bezos Family Foundation created a way for parents to sign up for weekly texts that suggest free, on-the-spot activities to engage the minds of their young kids. The tips, based on the science of early learning, are available on a website and a free smartphone app. But usage increased much faster among low-income parents when the tips were sent via text, in part because they reached caregivers who didn’t have Internet-enabled phones.

With a $20 million gift from Charles Schwab, UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley have launched a two-campus multidisciplinary clinical and research alliance to deepen the understanding of dyslexia and other specific neurodevelopmental differences that impact learning. The new center, with clinical and research efforts at both Bay Area campuses, will break down barriers between disciplines such as medicine and education, and create and provide the best evidence-based interventions in the clinic, classroom, workplace, and home. Known as the UCSF-UC Berkeley Schwab Dyslexia and Cognitive Diversity Center, the new initiative will draw on the deep and diverse strengths of both campuses – in child and adolescent psychiatry, psychology, neurology, neuroscience, education and public health – to accelerate research; develop and implement better screening and assessment tools; test new interventions; and reduce the social stigma surrounding dyslexia and other learning disorders.

A quarter of all kids with ADHD also have dyslexia, which complicates and slows down the process of learning to read. If your child is frustrated by books, follow these tips to build up lagging skills and to make reading less work and more fun. Tip 1: Seek reading support sooner than later. If your child is lagging behind classmates in reading, DON’T WAIT. Early reading lags are highly predictive of future reading problems. If your child is one of the few who catches up within a few months, great! But most children with reading lags require school-based and private reading support to catch up.

Educators are using digital tools to boost student learning more than ever. But few believe there’s good information available about which resources are going to be effective in the classroom. That’s the takeaway from a survey released Sept. 11 by the NewSchools Venture Fund, a nonprofit venture philanthropy firm that works with K-12 schools, and Gallup, a polling organization. The survey found that about two-thirds of teachers—65 percent—use digital tools every day and about 53 percent say they would like to use technology more often. (Those findings present something of a contrast with an Education Week survey conducted earlier this year, which found that only 29 percent of teachers felt strongly that ed tech supports innovation in their own classrooms.) Despite the enthusiasm for technology found in the NewSchools-Gallup survey, teachers and administrators also reported that they don’t have as much information as they’d like about which digital tools actually help students master content.

When education philanthropy is discussed, the usual names come up: Bill Gates, Chan-Zuckerberg, Laurene Powell Jobs, the Walton Foundation. But one woman who’s rarely discussed has made a huge difference for pre-schoolers across the country and around the world, and that’s Dolly Parton. Her crowning achievement may well be the Imagination Library. The idea began simply enough. In 1995, she set out to send a free book every month to every child in Sevier County ages birth through five. In 2000, the program moved to expand across the country, and was quickly picked up by 27 affiliates in 11 states. In February of 2018, the Imagination Library presented its 100 millionth book to the Library of Congress.

White and Hispanic adults make up the largest percentage of U.S. adults with low levels of English literacy, according to the most recent results of a survey on adult skills. The National Center for Education Statistics released a new Data Point report today July 2, 2019, entitled “Adult Literacy in the United States.” This Data Point summarizes what data from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) show about adult literacy in the United States. The findings include the following: forty-three million U.S adults possess low English literacy skills; U.S.-born adults make up 66 percent of adults with low levels of English literacy skills in the United States; non-U.S.-born adults comprise 34 percent of the population with low literacy skills; and white and Hispanic adults make 35 percent and 34 percent, respectively, of U.S. adults with low levels of English literacy.

In Part 1 of WBUR’s special series “The 50 Year Fight: Solutions For Closing The Achievement Gap” the panelists discuss how the “achievement gap” has been defined historically, preferring the term “opportunity gap” to “achievement gap” (and what that says about the underlying problem), factors that influence the achievement gap, curriculum inequality in schools, and misconceptions about the achievement gap.

Wisconsin’s young readers are falling behind as other states embrace the science of reading. The Madison Metropolitan School District said it’s taking a big step toward a focus on phonics in an effort to help their students who are struggling. Currently, many school districts in the state, including MMSD, use cueing techniques to teach young readers. This means when a student comes to a word they don’t know, they’re often encouraged to guess the word, try to figure it out by looking at a picture, skip it or replace it. “There are different ways of figuring out the word, but only one of them is reading. And what we know about reading is skilled readers, beginning readers who go on to be skilled readers, use letters and sounds to figure out words,” said Steve Dykstra, who is part of the Wisconsin Reading Coalition, a grassroots movement pushing for the state to embrace the science of reading. He said research in the ’90s showed that children learn best when they are taught to match sounds to words, training their brains to develop that skill.

The International Literacy Association (ILA) released a new position statement today declaring that access to excellent literacy instruction is the right of every child, everywhere. The new position statement was crafted by a global team of educators, researchers, and advocates. The statement focuses on four tenets: the right to knowledgeable and qualified literacy educators; the right to integrated support systems; the right to supportive learning environments and high-quality resources; and the right to policies that ensure equitable literacy instruction.

Critical thinking is all the rage in education. Schools brag that they teach it on their websites and in open houses to impress parents. Some argue that critical thinking should be the primary purpose of education and one of the most important skills to have in the 21st century, with advanced machines and algorithms replacing manual and repetitive labor. But a fascinating review of the scientific research on how to teach critical thinking concludes that teaching generic critical thinking skills, such as logical reasoning, might be a big waste of time. Critical thinking exercises and games haven’t produced long-lasting improvements for students. And the research literature shows that it’s very difficult for students to apply critical thinking skills learned in one subject to another, even between different fields of science. “Wanting students to be able to ‘analyse, synthesise and evaluate’ information sounds like a reasonable goal,” writes Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. “But analysis, synthesis, and evaluation mean different things in different disciplines.”

When we think of literacy, we tend to think of reading. Schools, literary nonprofits and philanthropists often focus on encouraging students to be strong readers with solid comprehension skills. While those skills are crucial, many experts say critical and creative writing skills are equally important, and are too often overlooked. Writing is active, encouraging students to be independent thinkers, take ownership over their own stories and ideas and communicate them clearly to others, said Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, executive director of the National Writing Project, which offers resources for teachers who want to encourage students to write. Rebecca Wallace-Segall, executive director of a New York City writing center, Writopia Lab said, “Writing impacts your ability to read. Over 90% of our kids who come in as reluctant writers, parents have reported they become more engaged readers as they’ve fallen in love with the writing process.”

Over three decades, Ms. Frizzle and the students on the Magic School Bus have visited the dinosaurs, dived inside the human body, gotten lost in the solar system, traveled inside a beehive, and explored the senses, among other adventures. Now, creators Joanna Cole and Bruce Degan say that the eccentric and lovable elementary school teacher and her class are about to take their “longest class trip ever” — back billions of years to understand the origin of life. “The Magic School Bus Explores Human Evolution,” written by Cole, and illustrated by Degan, will be published in July 2020. The PBS NewsHour caught up with them to talk about how some people could find it controversial, and why it’s more important than ever to tackle the subject now.

New research on language skills development suggests that all children can benefit from exposure to more speech from their caregivers. The study is the first to extend research about the relationship between caregiver speech and infant language development from typically developing children to those with autism. University of Texas at Dallas researchers believe their findings could inform guidelines for earlier action in cases of developmental difficulties. Dr. Meghan Swanson said the investigation is the first to extend research about the relationship between caregiver speech and infant language development from typically developing children to those with autism.

This school year, The New York Times is launching a new series called Mentor Texts, resources to help teach young people how to write. In general each edition in the series will 91) spotlight an excellent piece of writing published in The New York Times, whether on the front page or from sections like Opinion, Arts, Science, Sports, Business, Food, Travel or Style; (2) try to demystify for students the effective craft moves writers make, then provide exercises that invite them to try those same moves in their own work; and (3) show students how the writing genres they study in school can be used in real-world contexts.

Even young children know what typical dogs and fish look like, and they apply that knowledge when they hear new words, reports a team from the Princeton Baby Lab, where researchers study how babies learn to see, talk, and understand the world. In a series of experiments with children three to five years old reported in the current issue of the Journal of Child Language, the researchers found that when children are learning new nouns, they use what they know about these objects—how typical or unusual they are for their categories (such as fish, dog, bird, or flower)—to help them figure out what these words mean. This type of sophisticated reasoning was thought to only develop later.

One million free children’s books have been mailed to D.C. families since the city partnered with famed country singer Dolly Parton three-and-a-half years ago on her national initiative to promote early literacy. The D.C. Library’s “Books From Birth” program—which sends enrolled kids a free book every month until their fifth birthday—hit the milestone in August, prompting Parton to call it a “remarkable achievement to celebrate” in a letter to city officials. Almost 35,000 children across the city are currently registered to receive books through the program, which kicked off in early 2016. The program is part of Parton’s Imagination Library, which she launched in 1995 to promote reading among children. While it originally only served kids in her home of Sevier County, Tennessee, it has since expanded to dozens of counties and states across the U.S. as well as programs in the United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland, and Canada.