California's Reading Dilemma

EdSource Special Report

A movement rises to change the teaching of reading

Above: Esti Iturralde and her daughter Winnie read "Harry Potter” together at home in the living room while their dog Roscoe hangs out.

Low test scores fuel demands for change

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Este artículo está disponible en Español. Léelo en español.

When Esti Iturralde’s daughter Winnie was in first grade, the girl struggled with learning to read. Like most parents, Iturralde blamed herself at first.

“I thought there was something wrong with my kid. I thought there was something wrong with us,” said the Bay Area mother of two. “I just couldn’t really understand what was going on.”

The teacher consoled that Winnie just wasn’t ready, but Iturralde, a psychologist, began to suspect the type of reading instruction was holding her child back.

“Her teacher was wonderful,” she said. “She created a really vibrant classroom for literacy with beautiful read-alouds and publishing parties. She involved families in reading to the children. So I thought, what’s missing here?”

Iturralde ended up getting a crash course in the science of reading. Part of what she learned is that the human brain is wired to speak but not to read, because written language remains a relatively new invention in human history.

Many educators, however, believe that reading comes naturally, like talking, if the child is immersed in a language-rich environment. That’s why Winnie didn’t get enough explicit instruction in school about phonics, the link between letters and sounds.

The reading wars

Phonics, a method of correlating sounds with letters, may not seem like a controversial concept, but it’s anathema in some academic circles. Many teachers dismiss the practice of sounding out words as old-fashioned drudgery that prevents children from loving literature.

This view of reading harks back to Horace Mann, the father of American public education, who attacked teaching phonics and the alphabet in the 1800s. He believed children should learn to recognize whole words, one of the keystones of the “whole language” movement, which set the foundation for the “balanced literacy” approach used in many California schools from one end of the state to the other.

For the record, balanced literacy touches on phonics, experts say, but it does not give it the laser focus of a “structured literacy” program, which is rooted in phonics and other fundamentals and steeped in the science of reading.

“There’s a phobia about breaking down words into little parts. If you boil it down to the letters on the page, they fear, certain magic may be lost,” said Iturralde. “There’s also the belief that you have to let children discover things for themselves.”

Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource

Esti Iturralde with her two daughters, Winnie, left, and Lorea, right.

The philosophical tug-of-war between teaching phonics, how to sound it out, and teaching meaning, how to think it through, persists despite exhaustive research suggesting that most children must be explicitly taught how to connect sounds with letters. To make matters worse, most of this is an insider debate that most parents and caregivers know little about. Even the terminology, from balanced literacy to structured literacy, seems designed to scare off the uninitiated.

How many children have been collateral damage in this war of words? The pendulum has been swinging between these competing approaches for decades, despite a body of research on the subject that was codified as far back as 1999 when Congress convened the National Reading Panel.

Some call this battle over reading strategy, “the reading wars.” It’s a conflict that is resurfacing in California and inciting change across the country.

This ongoing EdSource series will do a deep dive into the scope of the literacy crisis in California, digging into emerging research, state policy, a groundbreaking lawsuit, teacher training and bilingual issues, to assess just how much is at stake in a state that fails to teach more than half of its children how to read.

“A generation of kids got sold down the river,” said Austin Beutner, a former Los Angeles Unified superintendent. “They have no grounding in the fundamentals of phonics and decoding. Less than half the kids can read. That’s staggering to me. How can we find that acceptable?”

With New York City and several states shifting their approach and balanced literacy guru Lucy Calkins admitting to flaws in her influential curriculum, “Units of Study,” this academic debate is coming to a head in California. Educators and policymakers are at odds over myriad thorny issues, from battles over curricula  and the politics of teacher credentialing to a newly-funded program to place reading coaches into high-need schools as the literacy crisis deepens in the wake of the pandemic. The central question emerges: Why do so many children struggle to read, and how can their teachers and caregivers help them?

Credit: "The Right To Read" documentary by Jenny Mackenzie

Jessica Reid Sliwerski, right, founder of reading tutoring and curriculum non-profits, helps teacher Sabrina Causey with her first-grade class at Markham Elementary School in East Oakland.

“The literacy crisis in our country is not because kids can’t learn to read,” said Jessica Reid Sliwerski, a literacy expert and founder of Open Up Resources, a nonprofit that offers accessible curricula. “The problem is that a huge swath of our population of young children never gets access to the type of instruction they need. They never get the opportunity to learn how to crack the code.”

Only a third of American students were found proficient in reading, according to 2019 scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as NAEP, the Nation’s Report Card. And that is before the pandemic disrupted schooling, sending test scores into a tailspin. 

“Our hair should be on fire. And the way in which we douse that fire is by getting really, really clear about how the science of reading can equip us to promote that liberatory outcome that reading can be,” said Zaretta Hammond, author of “Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain.” “Reading is how the brain levels up.”

In California, 48.5% of the state’s third-graders tested at grade level or above in English language arts in 2019. (Non-English learner students tested 57% at grade level.) Students who aren’t reading at grade level by the third grade will struggle to catch up throughout their educational career, research suggests, quickly falling behind their classmates and widening the achievement gap.

How does the brain learn to read?

One of the key concepts here is that lessons in phonics and other reading fundamentals help change the circuitry of the brain, experts say, forging pathways between the parts of the brain that interpret the auditory and the visual.  

When a child learns to read, as neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, author of “Reading in the Brain,” puts it, the brain creates an “interface between your vision system in your brain and your spoken language system.” 

That’s why children must be taught how to link the sounds of the words with the symbols on the page, experts say, how to connect speech to print. These neural pathways are like superhighways that become smoother and wider through use, experts say. Helping children forge these connections efficiently is the core of what experts call “structured literacy,” a phonics-based approach.   

“How kids learn is settled science, but we have this big implementation gap from research to practice, getting the knowledge to the classrooms,” said Becky Sullivan, a literacy expert at the Sacramento County Office of Education. “We basically have 360 days to get it right. You have kindergarten and first grade to get kids reading. … You have got to get it done, or you set your kids up for an intervention situation.”

The pillars of structured literacy instruction are often defined as phonics (connecting letters to sounds,) phonemic awareness (identifying distinct units of sound,) fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. Without a firm grounding in these foundational lessons, experts say, many children flounder. 

Iturralde, who has a doctorate in behavioral science, conducted some experiments with her first grader, dubbed the Purple Challenge, to see if Winnie would blossom with more phonics, which she did. But she is quick to point out that she lays no blame at the feet of teachers, who have little control over curriculum and strategy.

Teachers at a loss

In fact, many teachers, unaware of the compelling brain research, do not realize that skimping on phonics and other fundamentals may come at a cost. While some children will thrive anyway, experts say, others will falter unnecessarily. 

It’s only by looking back on their experiences with struggling readers that many teachers have a light bulb moment. Many say they will never forget the children they tried, and failed, to help because they didn’t have the expertise they needed. 

“I taught reading wholeheartedly and with a lot of gusto. I tried my hardest, but it was not systematic, it was not explicit,” said Monica Ng, a former kindergarten teacher turned educational consultant. “It was very sad because there were kids who were really struggling to read, and I remember saying to their families, ‘I don’t know what I can do to help you.'”

“It was very sad because there were kids who were really struggling to read, and I remember saying to their families, ‘I don’t know what I can do to help you.’”

Sabrina Causey, a first grade teacher at Oakland’s Markham Elementary, recalls going home and crying after a long day of trying to teach with a balanced literacy curriculum, which she now believes lacked enough phonics to be effective. 

“I was trying to teach the lessons, but they didn’t make sense,” said Causey. “For instance, I taught lessons in how to ‘scoop up’ words, but the kids in my class didn’t know letters or sounds. These kids had no basic skills. So I had one kid who could read that year.”

One of the most controversial practices in balanced literacy is “three-cueing,” which teaches children to guess at words. When faced with a hard word, like purple, Winnie had been taught to look for contextual clues, such as illustrations, instead of sounding out the word. Take the pictures away and she stumbled.  That’s why champions of structured literacy put the words first.  

“The biggest problem we have is that teachers haven’t been taught how the brain works,” said Nancy Cushen White,  a clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of California at San Francisco and a reading specialist. “Fifty years ago, it was understandable, but there’s really no excuse for it now. And the worst part is the teachers are working just as hard. Teachers will say, ‘Why didn’t somebody tell me this 10 years ago?’”

Critics of structured literacy, however, feel the phonics-based philosophy is too reductive. They worry that it’s a series of endless “drill and kill” exercises that will diminish the joy of reading. 

Champions counter that if a child doesn’t get firmly grounded in the fundamentals right off the bat, they may never get to fluency. Children run the risk of falling so far behind that they never master the deep comprehension that is mandatory in later grades. The sooner children can master the fundamentals, they say, the sooner they can immerse themselves in the splendors of great literature.

The secret is that once you get the basics baked into your brain, experts say, reading feels effortless and automatic. The pleasure of reading is the endgame. Phonics is just the warmup. 

The reading wars assume a dichotomy between foundational skills and rich comprehension that doesn’t exist, some experts say. Instead, they are entwined like the braided strands of a rope, growing stronger with every additional thread, as the metaphor of Scarborough’s Reading Rope illustrates.  Put simply, you have to be able to read skillfully before you can think deeply about what you’ve read.

“It’s just like building a house,” said Carol Tolman, a literacy expert and co-author of Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, or LETRS, a science-of-reading-based training for teachers. “If you build a foundation with a crack and you leave that crack, the first floor is going to be a little shaky.” 

Of course, children have varying needs, but only about 5-10% of children will learn to read without very explicit instruction, some experts say. These effortless readers may have given rise to the notion that learning to read should come naturally, but that is not the case for most.

While about 35% of children will learn to read no matter how they are taught, according to many experts, about 40-45% will struggle without clear and consistent lessons in the fundamentals. The remaining 10-15% qualify as dyslexic, and these children benefit the most from a structured literacy program.

“From an equity standpoint, foundational skills are something that is good for all kids,” says Sliwerski, who also created Ignite Reading, which specializes in Zoom-based tutoring, “but they are absolutely essential for the vast majority of the children.”  

Children who struggle with reading often internalize feelings of failure that may set the tone for their academic career, and time-pressed parents blame themselves, experts say, instead of realizing they are snarled in a systemic failure to teach reading effectively. 

“There’s an assumption on the part of the school that if students are not reading well, that’s the kid’s problem,” said Ng, the teacher turned consultant. “It’s a kid-level problem and not an instructional problem.”

Winnie, for her part, became a huge fan of phonics, zooming from reading level B (a kindergarten level) to level O (a second-grade level) by the end of first grade. She was so excited when her mom ordered a phonics book that she took a selfie with it. Now going into third grade, she’s an avid reader, with a special fondness for the Harry Potter canon. 

“I’m proud of her,” said Iturralde. “She talks about loving to read and it being her favorite part of school.” 

Unfortunately, not everyone has a highly educated parent like Iturralde around to help them connect the dots. Most families can’t afford a private tutor. That leaves far too many children out in the cold, educators say. 

“If the teachers don’t change the practice in the classroom,” said Timothy Shanahan, a literacy expert and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chi­cago, “you can’t possibly expect reading achievement to go up.” 

“If the teachers don’t change the practice in the classroom,” said Timothy Shanahan, a literacy expert and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chi­cago, “you can’t possibly expect reading achievement to go up.”

Is the tide turning?

While many California school districts use a balanced literacy approach, a compromise between whole-language, which focuses on whole words, and structured literacy, which focuses on phonics, change is underway in many quarters. 

New York City will require all elementary schools to adopt a phonics-based reading program in the coming school year. Oakland Unified began making that switch last year. 

Many states are also considering legislation that would require teacher preparation to include the science of reading.  A few states, such as Louisiana and Arkansas, have recently banned three-cueing, which encourages students to rely on clues, such as pictures, to guess the word. In California, SB 488 requires newly credentialed teachers to receive training in the science of reading, but implementation remains a sticking point. Changing classroom practice by virtue of legislation is no mean feat.

Credit: Palo Alto Unified

Todd Collins

“Given flexibility, teacher preparation programs will change little,” said Todd Collins, a Palo Alto school board member and an organizer of the California Reading Coalition, a literacy advocacy group. “And then, even if the standards are clear, there is a major gap between the rules and what actually happens.”

Issues of quality control and consistency dog the teacher training sphere as a whole, experts say. 

“There are about 1,500 teacher training organizations in the U.S. and they are poorly monitored and poorly supervised,” said Shanahan, founding di­rector of the UIC Center for Literacy. “We’re putting resources in, but our bucket has a hole in it.”

Meanwhile, in California, the governor and the Legislature are setting aside $250 million for reading specialists in the highest poverty schools in the 2022-23 budget, with $15 million more to train these coaches in evidence-based literacy strategies. State Superintendent Tony Thurmond has launched a literacy initiative to get all third-grade students reading by 2026, but he has also said he does not support a comprehensive statewide strategy, rejecting “a one-size-fits-all approach.”

Without clear guidance, schools and districts often pivot from one approach to another, experts say, creating confusion for students and teachers alike. Oakland and New York City have both flipped back and forth in recent years.

An issue of equity

Some advocates are calling for more accountability. They believe school districts have made mistakes for which students have paid the price. The ramifications of this failure, they warn, include a generation of young people who can’t compete in a knowledge-based economy. 

“This is a civil rights issue because people are being systematically denied access to their civil liberties and their opportunities because they’re illiterate,” said Kareem Weaver, member of the Oakland NAACP Education Committee and co-founder of the literacy advocacy group FULCRUM. “This is a social justice issue.” Weaver is prominently featured in the documentary “The Right to Read.”

Credit: "The Right To Read" documentary by Jenny Mackenzie

“The Right to Read” documentary is the story of the early reading crisis in America. Watch the trailer here.

The key question now, some experts say, is how to build a consensus for change. Bridging the gap between scientists and educators, each laboring in their own silo, may strike at the core of the problem, as Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, argues in “Language at the Speed of Sight.” 

“The gulf between science and education has been harmful,” according to Seidenberg. “A look at the science reveals that the methods commonly used to teach children are inconsistent with basic facts about human cognition and development and so make reading more difficult than it should be. They inadvertently place many children at risk for reading failure.”

The need to connect high-level research to classroom practice drives Margaret Goldberg, the literacy coach at Nystrom Elementary in West Contra Costa. She also collaborated with Seidenberg on a presentation about guiding principles to help educators design evidence-based curricula for the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading conference.

“I try to talk teacher-to-teacher in a way that makes teachers curious about the research,” said Goldberg, the co-founder of the Right to Read Project, a group of teachers, researchers, and activists. “A lot of us were underserved by our teacher preparation and underserved by our curriculum. There are a lot of conflicting messages out there about what we’re supposed to do and why.”

Reading research was the North Star for Kymyona Burk, a principal architect of Mississippi’s reading program. The poorest state in the nation, Mississippi was the only state to post significant gains on the NAEP in 2019. That turnaround was driven by a statewide literacy push that revolved around teacher training.  

“All children deserve teachers who have been trained in the science of reading,” said Burk, who is now policy director for early literacy at the Foundation for Excellence in Education, an education think tank. “We not only said we need children reading by the end of third grade, we also said we’re going to help you get there. We put literacy coaches in our lowest-performing schools, and we provided professional development to our teachers.”

Burk describes illiteracy as one of the most solvable issues of our time, but you can’t teach what you don’t know. In Mississippi, every teacher goes through LETRS, a science-of-reading-based training.  Still, even statewide strategies and teacher training are not magic bullets, experts warn. 

“It’s not something that’s easy to learn,” said Dale Webster, vice president of language and literacy at CORE, a nonprofit education consulting organization. “It’s not, you get a little course in teaching reading, and then you get a program, and then you just go to town. It takes a long time to learn the skills, and teachers need ongoing support to be able to do it effectively.” 

There’s also the issue of curriculum whiplash, experts say. Teachers who have been tugged back and forth by the reading wars may be resistant to yet another wave of change.

“You’re asking someone to change their identity,” said Aaron Bouie III,  executive director of PreK-5 curriculum in Ohio’s Youngstown City School District. “It is not easy to change a mindset. There will be tears. It’s not for the faint of heart.”

However, grassroots awareness of the issue is growing, reading advocates say, often fueled by social media conversations between parents, teachers and experts. The Facebook group “Science of Reading: What I Should Have Learned in College” now has roughly 170,000 members. There’s a Science of Reading corner on TikTok with short how-to videos. On Twitter, the hashtag #ScienceofReading is a hotbed of discourse.

Adding to that awareness was American Public Media education reporter Emily Hanford, who challenged the educational establishment by asking why educators were ignoring scientific research in the teaching of reading in a probing series of stories beginning in 2018.

One major sign of the times is that Calkins, a titan in the world of balanced literacy and a professor of education at Columbia University, has revised some of her philosophy, which largely viewed children as natural-born readers. Amid a rising chorus of criticism, she is revising her materials to acknowledge the science of reading.  

Credit: LinkedIn

Lucy Calkins

While the launch of the revised curriculum has been delayed, and details remain fluid, the reboot appears to downplay three-cueing, a mainstay of balanced literacy, include easy-to-read “decodable” books, and encourage sounding out words.

“When a child is reading a sentence such as, “It was cold, so I put on my jacket,” and the child gets stuck on jacket,” Calkins writes on her publisher’s blog. “We now suggest the teacher nudge by saying, “Look at the letters, have a go with that word,” rather than saying, “Think about what’s happening. What might the boy put on?”

This marks a clear shift in focus from the context to the text, where many argue it should always have been.

“To actually have a leader at an Ivy League institution that’s been held up as a kind of pinnacle of teacher preparation say, ‘I learned a lot of stuff in the past five years,’ that’s a big deal,” said Goldberg, who has penned several open letters to Calkins. “The research has been around for decades, and you recently learned about it as a result of public outcry?”

“To actually have a leader at an Ivy League institution that’s been held up as a kind of pinnacle of teacher preparation say, ‘ I learned a lot of stuff in the past five years,’ that’s a big deal.”

This high-profile pivot in thinking about learning to read, coupled with the disruptions wrought by the pandemic, may be leading the education world to a watershed moment, some say, a way to move beyond the latest skirmish in the reading wars. 

“We can seize this opportunity to get really effective instruction in place,” said Goldberg. “If we can allow teachers to have access to the information they need about how the human brain develops, how learning is best accelerated by explicit teaching, then teachers can be responsive to the tactic that will get the most kids, the furthest, the fastest.”

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  1. Donna L Taylor 6 months ago6 months ago

    Taking phonics out of the curriculum was a disastrous mistake. So let’s fix it.

  2. Sandra Smith 11 months ago11 months ago

    Thank you for the excellent article. I hope, for the sake of our children, that the public education system can see the errors in its ways, and make adjustments based on proven, science-based approaches. I can personally relate to many of the points in the article and comments. Out of my 3 kids, only one had difficulty learning to read. Despite spending hours with him, and trying to have him sound out words, it just … Read More

    Thank you for the excellent article. I hope, for the sake of our children, that the public education system can see the errors in its ways, and make adjustments based on proven, science-based approaches.

    I can personally relate to many of the points in the article and comments. Out of my 3 kids, only one had difficulty learning to read. Despite spending hours with him, and trying to have him sound out words, it just didn’t connect. After spending countless hours googling and researching, I concluded he had dyslexia, which he inherited from his dad. After meeting with his teachers and pointing out the signs in his reading and writing, they agreed that there was a problem, but had no idea how to identify the problem, nor what to do about it. They just weren’t trained. After trying to get help from his public school, and a disastrous 5th grade year that took a terrible toll mentally on my son (and me), I found a private school (The Prentice School), that uses research-based multi-sensory methods including the Orton-Gillingham Approach. After spending 6-8th grade there, he was a new kid, could read and write well, regained confidence in himself, happy, and went on to public high school and graduate college.

    Unfortunately, the price of the private school is out of reach for many families of kids who could really benefit. Teaching our public school teachers is the key! Adding similar special teaching programs at public schools would be well worth the expense!!

  3. Sheila Murphy 12 months ago12 months ago

    So good: “Our hair should be on fire. And the way in which we douse that fire is by getting really, really clear about how the science of reading can equip us to promote that liberatory outcome that reading can be,” said Zaretta Hammond, author of “Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain.” “Reading is how the brain levels up.””

  4. Zoe Danielson 1 year ago1 year ago

    I have an early childhood directors credential, a multiple subject teaching credential and a science credential for middle school. I have four children. No, children don't all learn the same way. Two of my sons learned through whole language and two learned through structured phonics. I paid for private school and tutoring for my "phonics kids." For myself, I never learned to read in school. I woke up one day in fourth grade and … Read More

    I have an early childhood directors credential, a multiple subject teaching credential and a science credential for middle school. I have four children. No, children don’t all learn the same way. Two of my sons learned through whole language and two learned through structured phonics. I paid for private school and tutoring for my “phonics kids.” For myself, I never learned to read in school. I woke up one day in fourth grade and could suddenly read, retain, and comprehend at the level of a college graduate. Go figure.

  5. Vanessa 1 year ago1 year ago

    Great article. I have no idea why schools thought it was a good idea to take phonics out of the curriculums. My sons always had trouble with writing and I bet had they had phonics from the start, they would have been better readers and writers.

  6. Margaret Sisson 1 year ago1 year ago

    I read this entire article and kept thinking why don’t they mention Montessori education? The reading program is based on phonics. An excellent program that was developed 100 years ago. No reason to reinvent the wheel …

  7. Ruby 1 year ago1 year ago

    Great article. A lot to think about in there. Reading for Pleasure is key but how do children get there if they aren’t taught the basics alongside?

  8. Cindy Mc Cartney 1 year ago1 year ago

    I was trained in Balanced Early Literacy for two years. I went to conferences given by lit leaders from all over at least once a month. I was teaching first grade at the time. All of my students displayed success in their reading skills. Phonics are just part of the balanced lit program, which turned out to be quite successful. Because I was the lit leader at our school site, I received more extensive … Read More

    I was trained in Balanced Early Literacy for two years. I went to conferences given by lit leaders from all over at least once a month. I was teaching first grade at the time. All of my students displayed success in their reading skills. Phonics are just part of the balanced lit program, which turned out to be quite successful. Because I was the lit leader at our school site, I received more extensive training. Perhaps that is the key to successful teaching. What if all of the kindergarten and first grade teachers received the training I had the opportunity to receive? Incorporating balance with phonics, and offering explicit training is what gives positive results. Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.

  9. Erik Kengaard 2 years ago2 years ago

    What happened to parents helping their kids? I don’t recall reading being a problem in the 1930s and 1940s. It’s insane to leave learning such an important skill as reading to K12 teachers. Same for basic math, physics, . . .

  10. Lois Horner 2 years ago2 years ago

    I taught many first graders to read using a program called The Writing Road to Reading by Romalda Spaulding. Her program was based on the Orten-Gillingham method of teaching reading using structured phonics.

  11. Neiani 2 years ago2 years ago

    Great article! Teaching the science of reading to teachers is a must!!

  12. Tina Costantino-Lane, EdD 2 years ago2 years ago

    Thank you for an informative article; however, one aspect that was not presented was that the kindergarten standards have only recently included extensive phonics. Some kindergarten students are not ready for the abstract nature of phonics, others have underdeveloped language, and still others have no interest in learning how to read. Some students who struggle with reading in kindergarten may not struggle, if extensive phonics was postponed until first grade. Learning to read is not … Read More

    Thank you for an informative article; however, one aspect that was not presented was that the kindergarten standards have only recently included extensive phonics. Some kindergarten students are not ready for the abstract nature of phonics, others have underdeveloped language, and still others have no interest in learning how to read.

    Some students who struggle with reading in kindergarten may not struggle, if extensive phonics was postponed until first grade. Learning to read is not merely learning letter/sound correspondences as English has 26 letters but 44 sounds, and some words cannot be decoded. When the reading curriculum takes up most of the day, there is little time for other subjects. The content areas develop language that enable decoding.

  13. Sylvie Matte 2 years ago2 years ago

    This article is music to my ears!! I am a parent of a very high IQ kid who could not read, was diagnosed with dyslexia and was going to totally fail and probably drop out of school if I didn’t intervene to get her the instructions she needed. The system put the blame on me, on her but never on themselves. These years were the most stressful and frustrating of my and my daughter’s life. … Read More

    This article is music to my ears!! I am a parent of a very high IQ kid who could not read, was diagnosed with dyslexia and was going to totally fail and probably drop out of school if I didn’t intervene to get her the instructions she needed.

    The system put the blame on me, on her but never on themselves. These years were the most stressful and frustrating of my and my daughter’s life. I will do anything I can to help other kids not to go through this. It’s a nightmare.

  14. Sharon M Thurmond 2 years ago2 years ago

    Thank you Karen for this informative article. I will share it with my community. And yes, in order to enjoy reading and be proficient in any subject,…”children must be taught how to link the sounds of the words with the symbols on the page”. Our educational system has failed the majority of our students, but those of us who care, like The Natoma Black Parents United group. can and will stimulate change.

  15. Robert Bowman 2 years ago2 years ago

    As a reading instruction specialist, I have taught dozens of students how to read, using a phonics based approach. Every single student learned to read well. Teaching the sounds of letters is the key. Once a student grasps the fact that 16 of the 26 letters make only 1 sound, and 10 letters make more than 1 sound, the student begins to understand how to read.

  16. Sherry Goldojarb 2 years ago2 years ago

    I was a kinder teacher for 23 years with Los Angeles Unified. Most of my students were 2nd language learners. I would tell parents that one of the challenges was making the connection between letter forms and sounds. I provided an eclectic manner of teaching reading in order to meet the varying abilities of each student. I would say that 95 percent of my students were reading and writing by the end of their … Read More

    I was a kinder teacher for 23 years with Los Angeles Unified. Most of my students were 2nd language learners. I would tell parents that one of the challenges was making the connection between letter forms and sounds. I provided an eclectic manner of teaching reading in order to meet the varying abilities of each student. I would say that 95 percent of my students were reading and writing by the end of their kinder year. I would evaluate my success if the 1st grade teachers were happy with their incoming students.

    One thing I found helpful with just learning the alphabet was to include something physical, so we would learn the alphabet also using American Sign Language. It really helped some of the struggles. Unfortunately, school districts go with a reading program that is one size fits all. It doesn’t. They need to give teachers a little leeway to work in things that work for their own students and style of teaching.

  17. Harvey Daniels 2 years ago2 years ago

    SOR is not settled science. This is all about political control of schools.

  18. Renae Skarin 2 years ago2 years ago

    The author is correct in that the SOR systematic phonics instruction, along with, and not excluding the other strands of Scarborough's reading rope are essential to skilled reading. "The Reading Rope consists of lower and upper strands. The word-recognition strands (phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition of familiar words) work together as the reader becomes accurate, fluent, and increasingly automatic with repetition and practice. Concurrently, the language-comprehension strands (background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal … Read More

    The author is correct in that the SOR systematic phonics instruction, along with, and not excluding the other strands of Scarborough’s reading rope are essential to skilled reading. “The Reading Rope consists of lower and upper strands. The word-recognition strands (phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition of familiar words) work together as the reader becomes accurate, fluent, and increasingly automatic with repetition and practice.

    Concurrently, the language-comprehension strands (background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge) reinforce one another and then weave together with the word-recognition strands to produce a skilled reader. This does not happen overnight; it requires instruction and practice over time.” (dyslexiada.org)

    What needs to be emphasized is that phonics instruction alone is not enough for many kids to learn to read skillfully. The author places great emphasis on the reading wars and the issue of phonics vs. balanced literacy. While I agree that not enough training in phonics has disadvantaged kids, a lack of attention to language comprehension is equally as detrimental to reading development, especially for kids who arrive in classrooms with a different primary language then the one taught in schools.

    In addition, English learners may need support in contrasting the sounds of their home language as compared to English, along with a lot of oral language development to familiarize themselves with the sounds of English (which may be different from the home language). “Students may not be able to “hear” or produce a new sound in a second language. Students who cannot hear and work with the phonemes of spoken words will have a difficult time learning how to relate these phonemes to letters when they see them in written words.” (Colorin Colorado). In addition, some of the topics in texts may not be familiar to students from culturally diverse contexts, and if they are not taught vocabulary and background knowledge, they will be reading without comprehending what they are reading.

    We must be careful not to oversimplify the complexity of literacy instruction to “Just give them phonics and it’ll solve everything.” I don’t imagine that was the intention of the author, but the other important aspects of the reading rope were greatly deemphasized.

  19. Cynthia Damico 2 years ago2 years ago

    Great article! Thank you for the in-depth research and clarity of expression. I believe that the “science of reading” must not stop with reading words. Students further benefit when taught how words work within the structure of a sentence and are provided with the metalinguistic tools to discuss syntax and structure when reading and writing.

  20. Beto 2 years ago2 years ago

    Thank god I learned to read and write in another country. Americans’ obsession over this is nuts.

  21. Olive Josuweit 2 years ago2 years ago

    We are at a time of change. Thanks for writing this article. Children deserve the right to be explicitly taught how to read.

  22. Caroline Grannan 2 years ago2 years ago

    The battle between phonics and the various names of the alternate concept has been going on for decades. I'm 68, and my mom taught me to read before I started K with a book called "Why Johnny Can't Read," which demonstrates that the battle was happening in the '50s. (Of course we have no idea if or how well I'd have learned without the phonic focus.) My take as a longtime watcher of education is: … Read More

    The battle between phonics and the various names of the alternate concept has been going on for decades. I’m 68, and my mom taught me to read before I started K with a book called “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” which demonstrates that the battle was happening in the ’50s. (Of course we have no idea if or how well I’d have learned without the phonic focus.) My take as a longtime watcher of education is: people learn in different ways; it’s not like it was *better* in some magical past when phonics was the mode of the day; and it’s unrealistic to believe there’s a watershed moment coming. Hope I’m proved wrong (but don’t place any bets you can’t afford).

  23. J J 2 years ago2 years ago

    And.…cursive needs to be taught again. How can a newly employed individual read a handwritten messages from an upper level staff member?

  24. Kathy DAIGLE 2 years ago2 years ago

    Excellent article Karen D’Souza. Thank you for summarizing so many issues on one article.

  25. Tom Adams 2 years ago2 years ago

    Readers of this article should examine California’s English Language Arts/English Language Development Curriculum Framework. It combines the ELA and ELD standards into a coherent curriculum. The framework is available at https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/rl/cf/.

  26. Dr. Bill Conrad 2 years ago2 years ago

    This is a beautifully written article! Thank you! I spent a career as an assessment and accountability director advocating for scientific approaches to the teaching of reading only to be consistently rejected. I had to resign my position for my advocacy of the science of teaching reading. The teachers are not to blame. The state board, administrators and governance are to to blame. State Superintendent Tony Thurmond continues to advocate that it is up … Read More

    This is a beautifully written article! Thank you!

    I spent a career as an assessment and accountability director advocating for scientific approaches to the teaching of reading only to be consistently rejected. I had to resign my position for my advocacy of the science of teaching reading.

    The teachers are not to blame. The state board, administrators and governance are to to blame. State Superintendent Tony Thurmond continues to advocate that it is up to school districts to choose their reading curriculum. This is unacceptable.

    Read The Fog of Education!

    Thank you again for a fantastic article!

  27. Rivkah Sass 2 years ago2 years ago

    As a former public librarian, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. A wise woman once told me that reading scores had not fundamentally changed in 50 years which might have served as a clue to educators that the approach to teaching reading using whole language and context was part of the problem, not the solution. Instead, as Emily Hanford pointed out in her excellent podcast series on the science of reading (2019), former … Read More

    As a former public librarian, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. A wise woman once told me that reading scores had not fundamentally changed in 50 years which might have served as a clue to educators that the approach to teaching reading using whole language and context was part of the problem, not the solution.

    Instead, as Emily Hanford pointed out in her excellent podcast series on the science of reading (2019), former educators were making lots of money selling their products making it difficult for school districts to make substantive change that would actually benefit children. The result? Frustrated teachers who know better, kids who are behind and parents who blame themselves. What a shame.

  28. ann 2 years ago2 years ago

    Oh, so much to comment on. In 1989 when I was home with my infant child and not yet an educator, I avidly read the once great Los Angeles Times. That year they had a long form article called, no less, "The Reading Wars." So comprehensive was the research stated there I naively believed that our educational institutions must be rapidly adjusting to systematic reading instruction. I believed the "war" had been won. Yet when … Read More

    Oh, so much to comment on.

    In 1989 when I was home with my infant child and not yet an educator, I avidly read the once great Los Angeles Times. That year they had a long form article called, no less, “The Reading Wars.” So comprehensive was the research stated there I naively believed that our educational institutions must be rapidly adjusting to systematic reading instruction. I believed the “war” had been won.

    Yet when I did enter the field a decade later, even with the National Reading Panel out and available across the country, I came across the hard heads and bullies in the California educational system from Sacramento down to the district and school level, who refused to “accept the science” (ironic). Our “teaching institutions” have stubbornly resisted preparing our teaching workforce to teach reading, saddling our schools with teachers who either adopt a resistant stance to teaching reading systematically, grow frustrated and dissatisfied with education and leave the field, or just spend a career thinking some kids just can’t learn.

    This also has lead to over referral to Special Education. Hundreds of thousands of students have lost the opportunity to learn to read and we all know the damaging consequences to them personally and to society. This institutional failure of teacher training has also been documented clearly by reports from the National Council on Teacher Quality, first in the early 2000s and continuing today but literally denied by tax payers supported public universities in California! Though I appreciate this reporting today, Ed Source has also been wishy washy on the subject over the past decade since I have been following. The comments by Webster and Boui are nonsense. Reading science is not difficult to learn and doesn’t take years to learn. If Mississippi can do it, why not California? By the way the brave reporter in Mississippi was named Emily Hanford, a true and rare hero journalist and her piece can be listened to here: https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2018/09/10/hard-words-why-american-kids-arent-being-taught-to-read.

    Finally, though I am passionate about this subject and have much more to say, when Tony Thurmond, the State Superintendent, cannot be a firm supporter of the science, he does not deserve (never did in my view) to hold his position!