Today’s Literacy Headlines

More districts and schools are using tiered systems of support, with an increased focus on building up students’ social-emotional skills. That’s according to a survey by Panorama Education, an education technology company that provides tools to help school districts adopt and use multi-tiered system of supports, or MTSS. MTSS is a framework implemented by thousands of districts across the country, with the goal of identifying and meeting every student’s unique instructional, social-emotional, and behavioral needs, according to Panorama. It is based on three tiers of support, each more personalized and intensive, with the understanding that not all students need the same amount of instruction and intervention.

The 10 winners of The New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Children’s Books Award are chosen each year by a rotating panel of three expert judges. On the 2023 panel were Sean Qualls, an award-winning illustrator of many acclaimed picture books; Maria Popova, a cultural critic and picture book author; and Christopher Lassen, a children’s librarian at the New York Public Library.

My students love to be on the computers and get so excited when I say we are going to be doing a lesson online. However, I refuse to allow students to simply log screen time in my classroom. The tools and resources my students use must generate discussion and are often used in a team or partner setting, as I strongly believe that student interaction supports our instructional goals. Here are are five of the best online tools I’ve found that support student discussion and help improve literacy.

While many public school students remain months or years behind academically, significantly fewer are participating in supplemental academic programs over the summer and this school year. Fewer than 1 in 5 K-12 students participated in academic programs in public schools this summer, and about 1 in 8 are taking part in remedial or enrichment activities after school in 2023-24 — both down from the last school year, according to the latest results from the federal School Pulse Panel, which came out this week.

A Navajo scholar offers insight and resources for educators. Farina King, a Navajo Nation citizen, is the Horizon Chair of Native American Ecology and Culture and associate professor of Native American studies at the University of Oklahoma. “Every November, someone contacts me to present about Native Americans for Native American Heritage Month. In such presentations, I provide background about the month and why it matters. But I also emphasize how important it is to learn about Native Americans not just in a single month or at a single event. I stress turning to and listening foremost to Native American and Indigenous voices throughout the year.”

We Need Diverse Books has launched Indigenous Reads Rising (IRR), a new website dedicated to “celebrating Indigenous children’s literature of Native Nations.” The site features booklists and articles on Native American literature, land acknowledgment, and tropes and stereotypes, as well as extensive resources for teachers, librarians, and readers. The goal of the resources is to help educators use Native books in the classroom and offer guidance and best practices on how to teach those books. 

A recent bill introduced by United States legislators whose children have dyslexia is exposing the importance of testing children for dyslexia and providing dyslexia accommodations for those who need them. Dyslexia is one of the most significant causes of illiteracy in the United States, and U. S. Senator Bill Cassidy, who hails from Louisiana, is no stranger to the subject. “It is an issue that is very important to me, both as a parent of a dyslexic child and as a Senator,” Cassidy said in a Senator Education Hearing on Dyslexia in 2016. 

Most tests that elementary teachers take to enter the profession don’t adequately measure their knowledge of best practices for reading instruction, a new analysis contends. How elementary teachers are prepared to teach reading has become a central topic in the “science of reading” movement, a national push to align literacy instruction with evidence-based practices. Some in the education field, including NCTQ, make the case that stronger licensure tests will lead to better student reading outcomes. But changes to state licensing systems, especially those that introduce new requirements, have long been controversial.

As district superintendents who oversee more than 80 schools combined in Brooklyn and the Bronx, we have seen firsthand how a well-chosen reading curriculum can spark and hold students’ interest, sharpen instruction, and shape classwork that builds confidence and literacy alike. In our schools, reading lessons build foundational skills, vocabulary, critical thinking, and a bank of background knowledge that connects students to one another and prepares them for lifelong learning.

Jill Moore’s wheelchair doesn’t prevent her from exploring parks, playgrounds and other public spaces. In fact, as an inclusive play specialist for Minnesota-based playground designer Landscape Structures, she’s developed an expertise in noodling through landscapes that able-bodied people sometimes take for granted, searching for access opportunities and impediments designers might have overlooked, or as she puts it, “connecting the lived experience with the design.”

Two groups have aimed to find consensus in one contested area of the ongoing reading wars: what the “science of reading” should look like for English learners. In a statement released in October, The Reading League, an organization that advocates for the science of reading, and the National Committee for Effective Literacy, a group that promotes research and policies to support literacy development for English learners, agreed on best practices for evidence-based reading instruction for EL and emergent bilingual students.

These picture books feature characters who find ways to communicate with older relatives or with each other, even when they don’t share a common language.

Our comprehensive, all-in, research-based look at the design of effective learning spaces. We tried to identify factors that might be addressed within classrooms immediately, or within school or district budgets over a longer term. 

Intervention systems work when they are supported by great Tier 1 instruction, embedded as research-based tools, implemented with fidelity, and when the most qualified educators are working with our neediest students. If those four qualifiers are not met, then RTI or MTSS is likely costing your school or district an exorbitant amount of money and time while not having a significant impact on the performance of your students. There are five steps an administrator can take to examine the effectiveness of these programs. Administrators should carefully evaluate the goals of intervention programs, what they hope to achieve, and how closely they are being followed. 

Names are one of the topics covered in We’re Gonna Keep on Talking, which Orr co-authored with Philadelphia educator Matthew R. Kay. The book guides educators through how to foster meaningful conversations about race with elementary school students. The names unit, which Orr has done about five times over the last 15 years, uses books to initiate discussions within the classroom. The authors recommend how to structure partner and class dialogues and how to create a supportive environment for students to share their experiences related to names. The unit also encourages students to delve deeper into their own identities by gathering information about their names from their families.

Studies have shown that students who score higher on tests of general knowledge are also comprehend more of what they read. Informed by these findings, some curriculum companies have organized their English/language arts series to build students’ background knowledge on a collection of topics. Now, advocates of this knowledge-building approach have released a tool, designed for states, districts, and schools to evaluate how well curricula they’re planning to adopt meet this goal—or how their current selections stack up. The Knowledge Matters Campaign, a group that advocates for this approach to ELA instruction and has endorsed several curricula, debuted the tool on Wednesday.

Today, the Knowledge Matters Campaign is unveiling a new K-8 English language arts curriculum review tool to advance the understanding of truly high-quality, content-rich literacy instruction. The new Knowledge Matters Review Tool identifies eight dimensions to high-quality, content-rich ELA curricula.

Intensive, high-dose tutoring can boost early reading skills, even in a virtual format, according to a new experimental study. Researchers from the National Student Support Accelerator at Stanford University tracked the reading progress of about 2,000 K-2 students in a dozen Texas charter schools. Through video chats, each tutor gave groups of one or two participating students supplemental lessons in phonics and decoding for 20 minutes a day, four times a week, from September 2022 through May 2023

The Ravenswood City School District, which has about 1,600 students in its elementary and middle schools (excluding charters) in East Palo Alto and Menlo Park, saw chronic absenteeism spike from just 471 out of 2,549 (18.5 percent) during the 2018-19 school year to 846 out of 1,637 students (51.7 percent) in 2021-22. This one district is just one example of a nationwide issue. In 2021-22, 6.5 million more students across the U.S. missed at least 10 percent or more of school days than in 2017-18, according to an Attendance Works analysis. Students miss out on foundation skills that impact them forever when they miss school, including learning to socialize with their peers, said Sara Stone, Ravenswood’s assistant superintendent of teaching and learning.

By reading books out loud every day, teachers introduce students to higher-level texts and new vocabulary, while modeling deeper thinking and strong discussion skills.

When it comes to student demographics, such as children living in poverty, Oklahoma and Mississippi are often comparable. But the two states are very different when it comes to students’ ability to read—with Mississippi pulling away from Oklahoma. State officials are now trying to change that trend and close the gap, and some see Mississippi as a template. “Are we modeling after Mississippi?” state Rep. Dick Lowe, R-Amber, asked officials with the Oklahoma State Department of Education at a recent legislative study. “Mississippi had such a great turnaround. It’s just been amazing to see that. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel.”

Orton-Gillingham was once used primarily with children who have dyslexia but is now being used more broadly. That’s because it contains the five components of evidence-based instruction identified by two national panels on reading and early-literacy instruction: teaching phonemic awareness, systematic phonics lessons, promoting reading fluency, vocabulary learning, and reading comprehension. Underpinning this reading instruction is its multisensory approach, whereby instructors use sight, hearing, touch and movement to help students connect language with letters and words.

At Makakilo Elementary, Christine Carder posed a question to her first graders. “What letters make the sound ‘ea’ as in tea?” The class eagerly scrambled to write down the correct letter combination in their notebooks. This exercise helps to build students’ phonemic awareness, instructional coach Karen Yogi explained to the group of parents invited to observe Makakilo’s reading lessons for the morning. Older students will later advance to activities such as reading in pairs and assessing each other’s fluency and vocabulary skills, Yogi added. “This is why my son says he’s famished at dinner, instead of hungry,” said parent Donna Sinclair, noting the improvement she’s seen in her fifth grader’s vocabulary this year. Makakilo Elementary is one of about 80 schools in the state to receive funding from a roughly $50 million federal grant awarded in 2019 to improve literacy among the country’s youngest readers.

Is it better to have all English learners together, separate from their non-English learner peers? How about more instructional time in a heterogeneous classroom? Or pull-out sessions for language development? The answer, researchers say, depends on a variety of factors and decisions including the demographics of a district’s English learners, their language proficiency levels, teacher capacity, and the consideration of trade-offs that occur when choosing one grouping model over another. Yet some educators hold to the assumption that grouping English learners together—separate from other students—is the most efficient way to provide the additional support these students are legally entitled to receive.

American Falls swings conservative,yet the town has proudly embraced a goal that backers describe as “progressive”: universal preschool. Residents have rallied around a simple mantra — “read, talk, play” — and turned it into a movement. That homegrown success has been fueled by a broader experiment spreading across the state, where communities build their own systems for early childhood education. These ad hoc projects are known as “collaboratives,” and they bring together educators, school district leaders, and nonprofit and business executives to identify and dismantle barriers to early childhood development. It’s known here as early learning done “the Idaho way.”

Today’s K–12 classrooms are brimming with the use of technology. Students use computers and websites to access digital materials, work on projects and produce presentation materials, and take assessments, to cite a few examples. Alongside this widespread technological adoption, the growing linguistic and cultural diversity in classrooms has broadened the essential literacy skills required for students. Literacy skills extend beyond reading and writing printed texts and increasingly involve navigating varied communication styles in diverse contexts.

At Clinton Hill Early Learning Center (opens in a new window) in the South Ward, everything is designed with the city’s youngest children in mind. Many of the wall decorations are just 2 feet off the ground — the perfect view for infants and toddlers. The lobby overflows with plants and sunlight, the classrooms are filled with color, and the courtyard has climbing structures, toys, and, most importantly, padded flooring. Clinton Hill Early Learning Center offers one solution for closing gaps in financing early childhood education. The center is funded by the Maher Charitable Foundation, a philanthropy (opens in a new window) that engages in early childhood education projects and policy efforts and has previously funded the expansion of Newark early learning facilities.

Share these titles featuring Indigenous characters with young children, tweens, and teens all year long!

Today’s post is the latest installment in a series on simple moves teachers can make that offer the potential for large classroom impacts.

Here in Cicero School District 99, students are getting an extra 30 minutes of reading or math instruction every day, which adds up to around three additional weeks of school. School leaders hope that will be enough time to teach students key skills they missed and boost test scores. The initiative has added new instructional challenges for Cicero teachers, who were already busy putting a new reading curriculum in place and helping students cope with the ongoing fallout of the pandemic. Still, Cicero stands out for making a longer school day a reality. While many schools used COVID relief funding (opens in a new window) to beef up summer school or add optional after-school tutoring, far fewer added extra time to the school day or year.

Board books are a solid hit with tots and sturdy sellers in the publishing industry. They’re also a powerful tool for neurodevelopment in young children. The science behind board book learning supports the market boom around their popularity. “The number one most important thing about board books is the pages’ thickness, because babies and toddlers don’t have the fine motor skills to turn paper pages,” says Caitlin Gallingane, clinical assistant professor in the University of Florida’s College of Education. That enables the development of “concepts of print” — how to hold a book, how to turn pages. Babies learn these basics not just by seeing, but by getting their hands on books and mimicking their grown-ups.

Meg Medina, the current National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, has worked with the Literary Initiatives Office of the Library of Congress to create a project called Cuéntame!: Let’s Talk Books. The idea at the heart of Cuéntame — which means “tell me,” or, literally, “story me” in Spanish — is that talking about books is something that children should feel totally at ease doing, just as they’d talk about any other topic with their friends, family and teachers. Too often in school, talking about books is reserved for “book reports” or presentations.

More than a decade after it was phased out in most schools, elementary school students in California will begin learning cursive writing next year — thanks to a new law.

Schools are obligated to provide interpretation services for families of English learners, but most don’t. Now there’s some momentum to change that.

Scholastic is reversing course, saying it will no longer separate diverse stories for school book fairs after weeks of mounting backlash from educators and authors. The educational company, which both publishes and distributes books, waded into hot water last month after it confirmed that it was changing its policy for its middle school book fair offerings. It said it was putting most of the titles dealing with race, gender and sexuality into their own collection, and allowing schools to decide whether to order it, as they would with any display.

This post is the second in an ongoing series about small teacher moves that have the potential of a big impact on students.

School Library Journal shares its latest batch of starred book reviews, filled with a diverse collection of titles and a new counting book from the late Mauriece Sendak.

Our meta-analysis sampled 36 studies focusing on educational apps designed to improve math and reading skills in children aged 3 to 9. The findings bring good news: The overall effect of these apps is positive. But before parents and teachers rejoice and hand over tablets to their kids for the entire day, it’s important to note that the average positive effect hides significant variation in app effectiveness. Our study revealed that the effects of the apps ranged from slightly negative to hugely positive. With such a wide range of outcomes, it’s crucial to explore the characteristics of the studies and apps that may explain these differences.

At the beginning of the school year, it can feel like we’re endlessly assessing students. Especially with our youngest learners, we want to monitor their progress in phonological awareness, letter names, letter sounds, sight words, blending, etc. Trying to manage all of this data collection can feel overwhelming. But imagine how process monitoring can change when students are engaged in data reviews and goal setting. Changing my mindset around data transformed data collection from a monotonous task to the best part of my day. The impact of these metacognitive strategies extended far beyond simply monitoring academic progress. 

Dozens of Scholastic book fairs are ongoing in schools across the country this fall. Annually, the publisher provides books to about 120,000 book fairs, according to Scholastic’s website. Here’s what you need to know about what students can find at book fairs, who organizes them, who selects the books for them, and more.

Young readers will delight in these tales, both fun and (slightly) frightening, about preparing for and enjoying the holiday with family and friends.

Guest editors Tiffany K. Peltier, lead learning and delivery specialist for literacy at NWEA, and Marissa J. Filderman, assistant professor at The University of Alabama, saw the issue as a way to help provide clarity on the topic. In their opening letter, the pair write, “Many struggle to identify evidence-aligned intervention and assessment practices for students at risk for or identified with dyslexia. Understanding what dyslexia is — and what it is not — can better enable us to help students learn how to read and succeed in school.”

The remembrance of things past and the deconstruction of old traumas are at the heart of two exceptional new middle grade novels. “Remember Us,” by the National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson, and “Gone Wolf,” by Amber McBride, both draw from real-life events to imagine richly detailed worlds of pain and beauty. “Remember Us” recalls the fires of 1970s Bushwick. “Gone Wolf” begins in a 2111 Southern breakaway nation after a second Civil War.

The distinct and evolving genre merges devices of fiction and poetry with a clear narrative arc — and it’s uniquely compelling to middle and high school readers. To find out more about how middle and high school teachers are incorporating this exciting literary form into lessons, I checked in with educators from Texas to Shanghai and came away inspired to use verse novels with my students this year.  

A popular reading organization has sued the state of Ohio in an attempt to block changes Gov. Mike DeWine’s administration recently made to how early reading is taught in the state. The Reading Recovery Council of North America filed a lawsuit against the state and DeWine earlier this month, prompted largely by the bill’s attempt to stamp out a teaching practice that it has used in its own teacher-training program. It’s one of the first major legal challenges to a wave of recent state legislation aiming to align classroom instruction to the “science of reading”—the broad base of research on how children learn to read.

Students and teachers are again returning to campus, but this time in a new environment — in which Covid remains an ever-present threat, but no longer frames our everyday lives — as the country collectively adjusts to a new normal. Last year, in the first days of school, we sent reporters across the country to see how students were feeling about returning. This year, as school began, we sent reporters into the field again, to see how much — or how little — has changed, and to answer a simple yet pivotal question: Where are we now?

If graphic novels are flying off the shelves at your library, that reflects a remarkable trend: In the last few years, the format’s popularity has shot up at over 90 percent of school libraries, according to a new SLJ survey, with the biggest jump in elementary schools. Students are clamoring for humor and contemporary fiction, in particular, and manga is exploding in popularity. Manga works now comprise 43 percent of high school graphic novel purchases, according to librarians who responded to SLJ’s 2023 Graphic Novels Survey.

While most states remain behind, South Carolina and three others — Iowa, Mississippi and Tennessee — are recovering from or exceeding COVID-related declines in reading, according to researchers at Brown University. Iowa and Mississippi have also surpassed their 2019 performance in math. Experts say improvements in literacy instruction and an accelerated return to in-person learning are among the key policy decisions contributing to the rebound.

It’s fall, which means it’s Scholastic Book Fair season. Schools across the country are setting up shelves in their libraries and gymnasiums to let students shop a vast selection of books provided by the educational and publishing company. It’s a highlight for many students, and a nostalgic memory for many adults. But the events have also waded into controversy, after the company behind them changed its policy to help schools navigate the growing number of book bans in the U.S. — and was quickly accused of caving to censorship.

I’ve invited educators to share the three most important—AND most likely to be used—strategies that general education teachers can use to make their content more accessible to ELLs (and everyone else). Suggestions include framing the lesson, adding visuals, and being mindful of rate of speech.

COVID-19 impacted every aspect of life, and schools are still dealing with its residual effects. Many teachers blame the pandemic for low achievement and isolation from peers as the root cause of student conflicts in schools. But are there more positive narratives to tell? I sought out the perspectives of five teachers through informal conversations about how schools have improved since the pandemic. Four themes emerged.  In technology, mental health, and nurturing and solutions-oriented environments, COVID provided lessons schools have taken to heart.

An anthology that combines new work with selections from The Brownies’ Book, a children’s magazine launched by W.E.B. Du Bois, is bringing its mission to bear in a new national context. Karida L. Brown, a professor of sociology at Emory University and co-author of “The Sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois,” has compiled a tribute anthology of work by contemporary artists and writers punctuated with selections from the original magazine. “The New Brownies’ Book: A Love Letter to Black Families,” will be published by Chronicle Books.

As early literacy has become a national cause célèbre, there is momentum in about half the states to require or allow retention of students in third grade who are behind grade level in reading. The case for retention has powerful appeal. Research shows that students who are behind after third grade rarely catch up. And as RAND Corporation researchers Umut Ozek and Louis T. Mariano wrote this month in a policy brief for The Fordham Institute, the tide of research shows that retention is good for kids, at least in elementary school grades. That’s if it’s done right.

The latest batch of board books features smart offerings and sweet stories that meet young children right where they are developmentally. Many of these books are decked out with sounds, touch-and-feel elements, and die-cuts that will fully engage small hands and curious, growing minds. Also of note are the more sophisticated takes on the wider world that have continued to invade the board book category. For example, it’s now possible for toddlers to spend a few stiff pages in another country, immerse in another culture, or learn about climate change in their own.

With reading in elementary school, we can provide rigorous grade-level instruction, plan for rigorous grade-level meaningful learning opportunities, and provide responsive support. The most effective support comes in the form of just-in-time scaffolds that are temporary and provided only if needed. I focus on data to plan scaffolds (including observation and student work), rather than making assumptions about who needs them.

What, exactly, does the “science of reading” mean? The phrase has become popular over the past several years, used as a shorthand for many of the instructional changes schools have adopted to bring reading instruction more in line with research on how kids actually learn to read. But not all educators share the same definition, an EdWeek Research Center Survey found, a potential challenge to better aligning research and practice nationwide.

Jeff Kinney, author of the mega-bestselling Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, holds a unique position. With the launch of volume #18 in the series, No Brainer, he will use the requisite book tour to make a statement—in support of libraries. “We decided to put on a tour in which librarians and libraries are really the centerpiece,” he says. “These days, especially, librarians have been put in this position where they have to be very courageous, with the constant threat of book bans. Being at the center of the culture wars, libraries are in a really vulnerable position.”

The number of students in special education in the United States has doubled over the past four decades, with schools responsible for providing special services to a growing segment of their student bodies. The increase in the percentage of students on IEPs isn’t necessarily a bad thing, according to experts. While it could signal that traditional classrooms are less suited to meet the instructional needs of a growing segment of America’s student population, it could also mean that educators have become better at identifying when students need special services and parents have become less resistant to seeking them out for their children.

New works of nonfiction and fiction transcend stereotypes, and connect a wealth of ideas and facts for young readers. Over the last 25 years, children’s books by Native American authors and illustrators have presented a vibrant and expansive view of American Indians and America. Joseph Bruchac has been telling Native American stories since the 1970s, helping to fill the void he noticed as a child eager to read about his Abenaki heritage. With often inspired results, he has brought careful research to folk tales, biographies and novels.

Words matter. Bilingualism and multilingualism are superpowers. But the US education system has not always had that view. Traditionally, not speaking English has been seen as a deficit, and accented English has been considered imperfect English. This approach has made emergent bilinguals and multilingual students less confident and has reinforced stereotypes that lead to inequality. There is a rich cultural background to every student’s heritage, including the languages they speak. We must elevate and honor these students because they hold the superpower of bilingualism.