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My college friend Cathy called from Colorado a few nights ago. Her daughter, who is twelve years old and in sixth grade, has just been diagnosed with dyslexia. Her daughter’s reading problems all came to a head just a few months ago when Cathy, a professional actress, was helping her daughter learn lines for the school play. She noticed how persistently her daughter read the wrong word or skipped over words while rehearsing her lines. Cathy stopped cold, and had one of those gut-dropping parenting moments where you say, “I’ve seen enough.” She made a call to a psychological testing service to have her daughter’s reading evaluated.
Yet Cathy had known something was wrong for years; she remembered getting her daughter’s reading screener scores back in first grade, and being shocked because they were so low.
Cathy had approached the teacher at that time, most worried about her daughter’s decoding ability—her composite score was in the danger zone, at 27%. But the teacher assured her that everything was fine; her daughter was bright and her language skills were strong.
Those alarming reading-screener scores were the first of many to come, and set Cathy and her husband down a path of years of back and forth with teachers, and weekends and evenings worried about reading. Her daughter consistently underperformed when reading was involved, like on the quarterly MAP evaluations. She also had consistently poor spelling. They hired a reading tutor at one point, but barely began before the COVID lockdowns happened.
All the time, throughout elementary school, her grades remained high—Cathy’s daughter was motivated and conscientious. Yet Cathy noticed that her daughter always declined reading in front of her. They had moved schools and even moved states, from Illinois to Colorado, but when she got a new batch of teachers in their new home, teachers didn’t seem to be concerned. On several occasions, teachers had indicated that Cathy and her husband were more worried than the situation allowed.
Cathy requested a school-based evaluation for her daughter, but the school dragged their feet, so Cathy did what many parents with means do: went around the school and obtained an expensive evaluation at a psychological testing center. Cathy’s daughter now has an official diagnosis of dyslexia, and she has already begun to receive services from the school as well as a private tutor paid for by her parents. Her parents are throwing everything at the problem, to try to get her up to speed as quickly as possible. After all, she’s nearly in junior high.
I’ve been thinking about Cathy’s daughter in light of the current moment. Significant movement, maybe even progress, has been made in bringing needed attention to the research behind how the brain learns to read. Some of this has been put into state-level legislation—37 states are now requiring that teachers get trained in how the brain learns to read. Districts are adopting new curricula better aligned with the reading research, and getting rid of curricula that minimize or don’t include sounding out words. More schools and teachers are required to use screeners and are beginning to recognize—and take action—when the red flags of dyslexia and reading issues present themselves early.
The last two episodes of Sold a Story, the American Public Media podcast reported by journalists Emily Hanford and Christopher Peak, were just released, and highlight both all the progress and changes that have come about, largely from the earthquake set off by their reporting. Lucy Calkins, creator of the balanced literacy Units of Study curriculum, has made changes to her reading program to include more phonics—even as she defends it in local op-eds, ostensibly trying to stop more districts from dropping it.
But one thing I have noticed in speaking to parents who aren’t knee-deep in education, #edutwitter, or news junkies, is that they are often unaware of the changes. All the movement might give us in the edu-bubble the impression that learning to read in America is improving. And that is definitely happening in some places—states like Tennessee and Mississippi are seeing notable improvements.
But Cathy’s daughter’s story is important because of how far the public system has to go in their responsibility helping all children become proficient readers. Official numbers of students who really struggle to decode fluctuate from 5-20%, but as Hanford herself has said, look at the numbers of students who fall into the “below basic” reading category on tests like the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the “Nation’s Report Card.” In 2022, the number of fourth graders reading at “below basic” was 39%. At the student level, there are plenty of stories like Cathy’s. Cathy’s daughter has been in good schools for seven years, and not one person at the four different schools she’s attended in two different states thought that her reading troubles needed attention.
Cathy’s story also highlights how solving the reading crisis requires that a bunch of pieces in a loose and disjointed system all work together in tandem: the science of reading itself, the body of evidence on how the brain reads, cannot identify children who need reading help, nor is the body of evidence able to teach children to read. As scientists and experts have pointed out, teaching every child to read is not a simple process. It’s a group of humans who have to do that work, a process that’s stretched out over many years—a big ask for a lot of districts not exactly known for sticking with any initiative or idea for any length of time.
Which is why some of the cognitive scientists interviewed for “Sold a Story,” Mark Seidenberg and Reid Lyon, worry about how the science of reading will get implemented in schools—that crucial details will be lost in translation, as so often happens in our big, gangly school systems. Seidenberg makes an important point in the last “Sold a Story” episode, referring directly to the science of learning—”You become a good reader by spending lots of time reading, but there’s that critical first step learning how to decode,” he said. Explicit instruction is crucial to the first steps of reading, and a large chunk of kids need a lot of help learning to sound out words. Many flawed, extremely popular reading programs used by schools over the last two decades skipped or significantly sidestepped that crucial step. But after decoding has been mastered, getting good at reading is a lot about practice. As I’ve previously reported, reading books helps. Research suggests especially paper, print books over electronic ones.
Through the shakeout of the reporting on the science of reading, important details have emerged that can’t be ignored, like how the conversation about teaching kids to read can’t stop at phonics, that the first crucial step can’t be the only piece of reading reform. The other crucial pieces of learning to read, language and vocabulary, background knowledge and comprehension, are also key pieces of the big puzzle.
In the last episode of “Sold a Story,” Seidenberg also worries about science of reading dogmatism—that the movement could transform itself into something militant, that the “science of reading” becomes the thing that schools or individuals unthinkingly worship instead of Lucy Calkins, Fountas & Pinnell or Reading Recovery. If that’s the case, it is vulnerable to being just another “initiative” schools “try” as a short-term fix, which will never end up helping students. Yet outside of Twitter, where people do tend to get… passionate, I’m more worried about students like Cathy’s daughter.
In my favorite TV show, “The Bear,” main character Carmy Berzatto—a five-star chef with a host of trauma and emotional issues and an uphill battle to overcome them and save his brother’s restaurant—sports a tattoo across the fingers of his left hand: S-O-U. It stands for “sense of urgency.” The phrase was taken from a sign hanging in the kitchen of top restaurant The French Laundry.
“It is a reminder for us to push ourselves,” French Laundry chef Thomas Keller wrote about the sign, hanging alongside a clock where all the kitchen staff can see it. “For the need to be organized and focused so that we are able to complete our job and the ones following it successfully.”
As all the details roll out in classrooms, as the natural pushback comes to the ‘science of reading’ movement, and then the inevitable pushback to the pushback, it remains to be seen whether all this will “work”—whether it will translate into the public schools teaching more kids to read well. There’s a real chance that the rollout might not succeed, or only partly so—as a reporter, I’m guessing there will be missteps and disasters along the way, mishandling of funds, copycat ineffective curricula, incentives that don’t make any sense, and, almost guaranteed, political battles over whether all the fuss and money is worth it when improvements don’t show up quickly, preferably yesterday.
There will also be new research that clarifies or changes the current understanding of how to teach kids to read.
The thoughtful details are important. But in all this insider baseball it’s also important not to lose sight of Carmy’s tattoo. There are real children involved, and many of them cannot read very well.
A sense of urgency can go both ways, of course. It can lead schools to rush to make changes without considering the details, it can encourage shortcuts.
But Cathy views the sense of urgency a little differently. She can’t stop herself from thinking back to first and second grade, all those times when her gut was telling her that her daughter needed help, and she was told all was well.
Good stuff Holly.
Teachers/Schools are "false reassurance factories" when speaking to most parents, well, at least reasonably well-behaved kids. The report card, the PTC....all designed to avoid any big pushes against the typical day to day operation of the school.
It's the opposite of parents' experience with their pediatrician, who are wired to flag real issues.