Articles

LaTonya Goffney is superintendent of the Aldine Independent School District in Houston, Texas. Sonja Santelises is CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools. Iranetta Wright is superintendent of Cincinnati Public Schools. All three are members of Chiefs for Change, a nonprofit bipartisan network of school superintendents and state education leaders. America is finally acknowledging a harsh truth:…

States have passed—or begun enacting—laws requiring evidence-based teaching for early learners. Hundreds of thousands of teachers have gone through new training. A popular curriculum program was re-released with changes designed to bring it more in line with reading research, to mixed reviews. These shifts all stem from the movement around the “science of reading”—an effort…

MEMPHIS — For much of his life, Roderick, a high school junior, did not enjoy reading. As a boy, he trudged through picture books that his mother encouraged him to read. As a teenager, he has sometimes wrestled with complex texts at school. “I would read, and I’d go back and reread,” he said. “It’s…

Just in the nick of time for the last days of summer beach reading, there were a pair of big stories about reading instruction in TIME magazine and The New Yorker last month. That’s about as mainstream as media attention gets, and signals that maybe the tide really has turned on literacy instruction in American…

Over the past several years, more states have passed laws or implemented other policies requiring schools to use evidence-based methods for teaching young students how to read. These mandates touch on many different components of instruction, including teacher training, curriculum, and how students are identified for extra support. The legislative movement gained steam after Mississippi…

By accepting hard truths and embracing accountability, the nation’s poorest state became a national exemplar in math and reading growth. The 2019 data release from the National Assessment of Educational Progress didn’t offer news of much progress. The test, administered in schools biannually since 1969, had shown only lackluster academic growth in most states for…

Lucy Calkins, a leading literacy expert, has rewritten her curriculum to include a fuller embrace of phonics and the science of reading. Critics may not be appeased. Read the Article