I was listening today to a Rest is Politics report from the Democratic Convention in Chicago today. It was mentioned in the report that only 22% of students graduate from school proficient in reading. The ethnicity stats are startling too - 54% of white students and 17% of Black students are proficient in reading. It reminded me of Time magazine article that I read last year about phonics teaching in US schools, which is not yet standardised across the country, and is likely to be the main reason why reading is not being mastered by the vast majority of the population. You can read the full article for free here or my summary of the key points below.
The article describes a teacher in Oakland, California, Kareem Weaver helped struggling fourth- and fifth-grade kids learn to read by using a very structured, phonics-based reading curriculum. It worked for the students, but not so much for the teachers. “For seven years in a row, Oakland was the fastest-gaining urban district in California for reading,” recalls Weaver. “And we hated it.” The teachers felt like curriculum robots, and they pushed back saying it was dehumanising to be told how to teach. They fought tooth and nail to throw that out and it was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasised rich literary experiences.
Now Weaver is heading up a campaign to get his old school district to reinstate many of the methods that teachers resisted so strongly: specifically, systematic and consistent instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics. “In Oakland, when you have 19% of Black kids reading—that can’t be maintained in the society,” says Weaver. “It has been an unmitigated disaster.”
Weaver and his campaigners—including civil rights, educational, and literacy groups—want schools to spend more time in the youngest grades teaching the sounds that make up words and the letters that represent those sounds. His petition is part of an enormous rethink of reading instruction that is sweeping the U.S. In 2022 five states have passed laws that require training for teachers in phonics-based reading techniques, adding to the 13 that passed such laws in 2021.
Only 21% of low-income students (measured by whether they qualify for free school lunch), 18% of Black students, and 23% of Hispanic students can be considered on track for reading by fourth grade. These numbers have been low for decades, but the pandemic has given the dismal results extra urgency. “There have been choices made where our children were not in the centre,” says Weaver. “We abandoned what worked because we didn’t like how it felt to us as adults, when actually, the social-justice thing to do is to teach them explicitly how to read.”
While reading is a foundational skill, it is not a natural one. Given enough time around other humans, the vast majority of youngsters will learn to walk upright and talk. For most children, however, recognising that certain squiggles on a page or screen correspond to certain sounds requires painstaking instruction. In all, the 26 letters of the English alphabet can be combined to make about 44 sounds (depending on your accent). When those sounds are put together, they create 15,000 syllables and untold numbers of words.
There are many schools of thought on how best to teach reading, but the main controversy has been about whether children need to be taught how to sound out words explicitly or whether, if you give them enough examples and time, they’ll figure out the patterns. The latter theory, sometimes known as whole language, says teaching phonics is boring and repetitive, and a large percentage of English words diverge from the rules. (But what about letter strings like ough which can be pronounced in many different ways, though, thought, through, thorough, bough, cough and tough!) But if you immerse children in beautiful stories, they’ll be motivated to crack the code, to recognise each word. The counterargument is that reading is as connected to hearing as it is to sight. It begins, phonics advocates say, with speech. This understanding, and the data that supports it, has become known as the science of reading.
In the US, teachers were encouraged to use phonics since 2000, but this was diluted to become ‘balanced literacy’, which came to mean whatever anybody wanted it to according to Timothy Shanahan, a former director of reading for Chicago schools and an early-literacy expert.
Things might have stumbled along in much the same way, except that education departments around the country had begun to earn the ire of a particularly determined group: the parents of dyslexic children. People with dyslexia take much longer to sort out the connection between sound and symbol. The immersion method of teaching just does not work for them. Pressure from these parents, plus some crusading journalism, a steady stream of research, impressive results from several school districts, and heightened concern about pandemic learning loss, have finally turned the tide back toward a stronger emphasis on phonics.
Dyslexia is not linked to intelligence; it has been described as an island of weakness surrounded by a sea of strength. It has no cure but can be overcome. So when some wealthy, well-educated parents found their otherwise typical children were not learning to read, they had questions for the school. These were met in many cases with the advice to read to them more. The parents then did what educated, wealthy people do when they feel slighted: they looked at the research, paid for expensive testing, called their representatives, and contacted their friends in the press.
What they found was that the methods many teachers were using were not supported by the data. They were supported by theories, observations, hopes, and, some would argue, a few guru-like figures. Just as most children, no matter how many times they’ve been in a car, still need to be taught to drive, most readers benefit from being explicitly taught how sounds and letters go together. This is true not just for dyslexics (who represent about 10% of all learners) but for the majority of readers.
Some of the data these parents uncovered comes from the world of neuroscience. Cognitive scientists have found that as a child reads a word, the networks in the brain associated with vision activate first, followed by the areas of the brain associated with speech. There are also subtle but detectable changes in the brain as children learn to read, primarily a growth in the fibers that connect the areas associated with speech and vision. French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, in his 2009 book Reading in the Brain, calls this area “the letterbox.” His studies suggest that the brain never really learns to read a whole word, it just gets really, really fast at decoding. He believes that any type of learning that does not emphasise the sound of words is inefficient.
State legislatures, which have been getting an earful from dyslexia activists for years, have begun to act. From 2013 to Aug. 1, 30 states have passed laws or enacted new policies related to “evidence-based” reading instruction. Mississippi was one of the first, and in 2019 it became the only state in the nation to meaningfully improve its fourth-grade reading scores. The results were touted as the “Mississippi Miracle.”
Mississippi retrained all its teachers using LETRS (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling), an intensive training module that takes them all the way back to understanding the sounds in speech, what is known as phonemic awareness. Many states have followed suit. But retraining busy teachers takes a while and doesn’t necessarily change what they do in the classroom.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. Fourth grade (Year 5 in England) is a key moment in a child’s education. Until then, as the old saying goes, children are learning to read; after that they’re reading to learn. If they can’t, things head south. A 2011 study from the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that students who don’t read proficiently by the end of third grade are four times as likely to eventually drop out of school as those who do.
Not every child needs systematic instruction in phonics. Some, usually brighter children, can figure out the patterns for themselves. And phonics instruction alone is not enough. But the past several decades seem to have proved that a more intense focus on the letter sounds hurts nobody, and the many children who need it flounder without it. There are no panaceas in education but as with every educational programme, implementation is everything (see the EEF’s excellent guide to implementation.) Even the most science-steeped curriculum will not help if it is not implemented thoughtfully, with support from headteachers, trainers, trusts, local authorities and the public purse.
Wendy Adeniji, September 2024