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Shumita Basu, Narrating: This is “In Conversation,” from Apple News. I’m Shumita Basu. Today… why so many kids in America can’t read well, and how we can fix it.
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Basu, Narrating: America has a literacy crisis. For years, roughly a third of fourth graders have not met the basic reading proficiency standards set by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and scores only dropped during the pandemic. The pandemic also called attention to the problem in a new way, by bringing the classroom home, and giving parents a chance to see firsthand how their kids were being taught to read.
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Esti Iturralde: I'm trying to make sense of some contradictions I see between the well-established science of reading and how kids are actually being taught to read.
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Esti Iturralde is a behavioral scientist and a parent. She made this video after listening in on a few of her daughter’s first grade remote reading lessons during the pandemic. To Esti, it seemed more like her daughter was memorizing the stories, or using pictures, instead of actually reading.
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Esti's Daughter: P… Purple.
Iturralde: Mm-hm.
Daughter: I… paint…
Iturralde: Mm-hm.
Daughter: …the… fence… purple.
Iturralde: Mm-hm. Yeah. It's amazing how you're reading without even looking at the words.
Daughter: I… paint…
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So, Esti did a little experiment. She took away the pictures, and then showed her daughter just one word. “Purple.”
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Daughter: [STAMMERING]
Iturralde: [CHUCKLES] Okay. It’s like she'd never seen the word before in her life. You can actually see the camera frame shaking because I'm so stunned.
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Basu, Narrating: Esti learned that the strategies her daughter’s school was teaching didn’t align with what we know about how the brain learns to read. She had stepped into a decades’ long battle, one that some educators call “The Reading Wars.” There are lots of approaches, but it boils down to two different philosophies. The one backed by science emphasizes phonics, that is, teach them to sound out letters and words. The other is, teach kids to look for context clues and get them excited about reading, and the more granular skills will come naturally with time.
To better understand the so-called “Reading Wars” playing out across the country, I reached out to Karen D’Souza. She's a senior writer at "EdSource" whose reporting focuses on early literacy education in California. She says our classrooms need to catch up to the science, and fast.
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Karen D’Souza: Not enough kids are learning how to be adept readers, and that's going to be a stumbling block for a functioning democracy. I mean, how are you going to vote? How are you going to fill out a job application, really? Like what futures are open to you if you can't read well?
Basu, Narrating: I asked Karen to explain what we know about how the brain processes reading and what it takes to learn to read.
D’Souza: There actually is a different part of the brain that interprets the auditory and a different part of the brain that interprets the visual. And you need to make those connections. They're not hardwired naturally. You can't just expose children to it and assume that they will pick it up. Especially most children, the majority of children, need very explicit teaching to connect, especially sort of the wriggles on the paper with the sounds they hear in their ears. So, that's the thing. It's not natural and it's not immersive. You actually have to be taught, most kids, how to read. And I think that there are silos on campus, and the neurosciences are over here, and the teaching colleges are over here, and there isn't actually a ton of communication between those departments. So, even though if you would ask someone, you know, is this settled science about how children learn how to read? The scientists would say, yes, this is settled science. But if you talk to educators, it's really not settled at all.
Basu: How has our evolution in understanding how reading can be absorbed and learned, changed the way that we teach it in schools in America.
D’Souza: Things have really swung back and forth. I mean, we can track it all the way back to Horace Mann, who was the father of American public education in the 1800s. And he did not believe in phonics. He didn't believe in teaching letter sound correspondence. He didn't believe in teaching the alphabet. He believed children should learn whole words and the meaning of each word. And then in the 50s, I think, “watch Spot run” those kind of things pushed a more phonics approach. And in the 70s, I think it became more touchy feely, if you will, a little more, like, no, we'll nurture the love of reading, and out of the love of reading will come the actual learning how to read.
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Basu, Narrating: By the 1990s into the early 2000s, a new approach was emerging called balanced literacy. Balanced literacy is all about instilling in kids a love of reading, with less focus on phonics. The idea is just get kids in front of books and the rest will follow. Kind of like what Esti’s daughter was doing at the top of this episode. In this sample lesson from Roscoe R. Nix Elementary School an elementary school in Maryland, a teacher holds up a picture book with a line of text, and one word covered up by a sticky note, and shows how kids can look at pictures or word order to guess the missing word.
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Teacher: For example, if you were stuck on the following word, you would read, I can go down the hill in my little red, hmm… In my little red bicycle? No, that's a wagon. I can go down the hill in my little red wagon.
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Basu, Narrating: This approach of relying on context clues over teaching phonics really took off. But research was amassing that showed this isn’t how strong readers read. Lots of kids were falling behind. In 1999, Congress convened a group called the National Reading Panel. This major initiative reviewed all the research and concluded that the best approach moving forward is what we now call “the science of reading.”
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D’Souza: The science of reading is sort of teaching reading based on what we understand about human cognition. Phonics is sort of that very first part. The notion of sounding it out, you look at a word like cat, and you just break it down letter by letter, right? C-A-T. And maybe there is a picture of a cat somewhere on the book, but you're not really looking at the picture, you're looking at the word. The other stages of the science of reading, which include vocabulary. You know, explicitly building vocabulary, especially academic vocabulary. And then background knowledge, actually teaching kids things, facts and concepts and ideas, so that when they encounter them in more and more complex reading, they're more familiar with them. The more knowledge you have, the easier it is to read, and the better reader you are, the more knowledge you gain, and it kind of becomes a cycle. They call it the Matthew Effect, you know, where the rich get richer. The better you can read, the more you learn, so that a child that learns to read well a year before another child has this tremendous knowledge cache, this treasure trove of knowledge that is invaluable going forward.
Basu: And similarly, if you're a little bit behind at the first grade level, it's going to be hard to catch up at any point, right?
D’Souza: Absolutely. I was actually… I talked to a literacy expert once who said, you know, the trouble, normally if you have an expert, it's not teaching the child how to read. You can do that. We really know how to do that. The problem is, how do you go back and fill in all the things they should have already read?
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Basu, Narrating: The National Reading Panel kicked off a wave of interest in science-based reading education. President George W. Bush made it one of his big focuses while in office, funneling federal dollars into his Reading First program. But it faced opposition from some proponents of balanced literacy, and also from Bush’s political adversaries. The Reading Wars were in full swing. In many classrooms, phonics, a time-proven reading strategy, took a backseat.
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D’Souza: I think there's a lot of criticism, some of which stem from earlier iterations of philosophies that have centered phonics. I know in California, I think it was around the year 2000, phonics was really at the core of the approach and it was very scripted. Teachers were sort of told what to say and they weren't allowed to diverge from the methodologies. And I think a lot of people really bristled against that approach. And the knock-on phonics is that it's drudgery, it's boring, and kids won't like it. You're not teaching them to love reading and it's really important to teach them how to love reading. I think we do project our own adult concerns onto learning. And I think because most of us can't remember when we learn to read, we make assumptions about how it happened that might not be true. But in my mind, it's a lot like learning how to ski. If you can't ski, if it's painful and horrible, you won't love it. You need an actual lesson where they show you how to put the boots on and how to get down the mountain. And then later it can be fun once you've sort of mastered the basics of the exercise, of any sport really, right? Learning how to make a basket in basketball. You need the basics or you might hate it forever.
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Basu, Narrating: Fast-forward to today and, despite some criticism, the science of reading is widely believed to be the best approach. Again, it looks different in different classrooms, but the science of reading encourages a lot of instruction about phonics, decoding words, vocabulary and comprehension. Since 2019, more than half of states require teachers to learn about the science of reading, and just this month, one of the leading teachers' colleges in the country announced it’s cutting ties with an early pioneer of balanced literacy, in favor of, quote, “evidence-based approaches.”
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D’Souza: There's been a ton of progress. So, I mean, I would say, sort of, originally a state like Florida kind of codified a lot of the science of reading, rules and metrics, decades ago. So, Florida kind of set that standard and then a lot of other states are looking at what they did.
Basu: That's interesting to hear. I mean, what are Florida's literacy rates like today?
D’Souza: Miami has been sort of this poster child for literacy scores for many years. They managed to really transform the literacy rate. I think, as far as the science of reading, I think that's a fairly compelling example. More recently, Mississippi has made tremendous strides in terms of, you know, the kind of teacher training that people get and the sort of curriculum in the classroom. Mississippi went from having like the worst scores in the nation to making more progress than anyone, and now people call it the Mississippi Miracle. More recently Tennessee has made some great strides. I think sometimes when you have like teachers or parents or educators who are married to the way things used to be, the most compelling argument is just the proof, right? Like, well these kids who couldn't read, now they can read. So, a lot of people are persuaded that way.
Basu: Yeah. Tell me a little bit more about Mississippi because that is a really remarkable example. What has made Mississippi such a success story?
D’Souza: Because things were so extremely bad in Mississippi, there was more interest in, you know, taking a chance and really trying, like throwing everything out and starting over. And so in some ways that was a blessing because there was really freedom to act. And so they tried to look at all parts of the problem, right, like changing the curriculums in the classroom, teaching every teacher in the state of Mississippi about the science of reading. That was their sort of mantra, that every child deserves a teacher who understands the science of reading. So, let's do that. Let's train all of them. Probably the most controversial part of the Mississippi experiment is they have something they call the third grade gate. So, if you don't pass the reading exam in third grade, you don't get to be promoted to fourth grade. And so that was something that you know, is hard to do, right? And you could argue on one hand, people said, well, you can't really hold it against the children that they haven't met that benchmark, you know, is that punitive? But I think the argument in Mississippi was that it's not meant to motivate the kids necessarily. It's meant to motivate the adults, right?
Basu: Yeah, sure.
D’Souza: All the teachers know this has to be. We've got to pass this bar by this time so that you start from K getting a running start so that the child will pass that benchmark. And apparently, you know, it's been working.
Basu: I have to say, I've noticed that third grade seems to be a sort of marking point in terms of reading skills and literacy. I see third grade come up a lot in these conversations. Why is third grade considered such a make or break point?
D’Souza: By third grade, you need to be reading to learn and not learning to read. Third grade is important because after that, a lot of the content is more specialized. You know, in math, it's word problems. So, if you can't untangle the word problem, you're going to do poorly in math, even if you are great at numeracy, so that your literacy ends up holding you back. Science, for instance, history, all the subjects really start building on a fairly nuanced approach to what you've read. And if you don't have that, if you're still learning how to read, you know, none of the other subjects are gonna stick.
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Basu, Narrating: As I mentioned earlier, Karen is in California, a state that was forced to take action on the literacy crisis in 2020 because of a lawsuit. Ella T. Vs the State of California.
D’Souza: It was named after a child in the Los Angeles Unified School District, and it was basically on behalf of a lot of low-income children throughout the state who were not reading proficiently.
The plaintiffs argued that literacy is a civil right and California’s failure to teach kids how to read was a violation of their rights. It was a novel approach, to use the law in this way.
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D’Souza: I remember when I first encountered that literacy as social justice, I really had to kind of think my way through that. But it's absolutely true. You know that Frederick Douglass quote, right? “Once you learn to read, you will forever be free.” I think it is important to note that literacy was, you know, illegal for a long time, for a lot of Americans, and that it really is this key to agency and being empowered and certainly participating in democracy. So, there are those who would argue that, you know, if we're not paying enough attention to children of color, to low income children we're not allowing them to participate in democracy, and that is a violation of civil rights.
Basu: So, for California, how would you characterize the approach that was happening before this lawsuit and what are some of the characteristics of the program now?
D’Souza: It was settled out of court. A judge never came down on it, but out of that, the state of California has instituted sort of a program for these schools and Sacramento County Office of Education is overseeing it. Now, they're not mandating a science of reading approach, but what they are doing is exposing all the teachers and the principals to what we have learned with the science of reading, and letting those schools take from that what they will. California is still a local control state, so each district, and in fact each school, can make their own decisions about how they choose to teach literacy or numeracy.
Basu: And I should say this is the case in a number of states. We actually have quite different standards across states and even across localities in terms of how this is taught. And what about just kind of pulling back and looking at it nationally for states that have adopted more science of reading programs and approaches in recent years, what kinds of results are we seeing? How do we measure results?
D’Souza: I mean, I think really you want to look at those benchmark years like Mississippi and the third graders. Fewer and fewer and fewer third graders don't make that hurdle over time. And I think that's sort of the ultimate proof. I do think legislation is kind of a clumsy tool to change something as nuanced as education, and there are a lot of obstacles to the science of reading really taking root. And I think… something I wrote in my most recent story, there's all sorts of challenges lying ahead, from kind of convincing teachers to rethink the way they do things, and then changing the way teacher training is done. And then there's this other factor, you know, reading on the screen is really different in terms of human cognition from reading from a book.
Basu: Oh, that’s really interesting.
D’Souza: So we have lots of screens in the classrooms all across the United States. There's lots of ed tech. So there’s so many different parts of this puzzle, I think, to unlock maybe some of the erosion in literacy that I think it's gonna be a while before we can get our hands around all of it.
Basu: Yeah.
D’Souza: But it’s incredibly hopeful that changes are being made. And also that your average parent is part of the conversation now in a way that wasn't true previously.
Basu: Do you have any advice for parents who are listening right now, whose kids are learning how to read and maybe they have some concerns that their child might be falling behind? What can parents do?
D’Souza: Yeah, you know, I actually did a story about this where I talked to like 10 experts and I said what's the biggest piece of advice you would give and most of them said, you know, that you kind of need to trust your gut as a parent in this and in so many other things, right? So, if you're not sure if your kid is reading at an appropriate level. You should just read with them, have them read things and listen to them and see what you think. You know, is there too much reliance on the picture? Are they understanding what they're reading? How do they seem emotionally? Do they seem happy about it? Do they seem proud of their skill or do they seem like they're kind of trying to make up for something they didn't quite get? And then, you know, maybe start from there. And if you think that they need more help, to feel empowered to talk to the teacher to get more help. Especially, you know, parents of dyslexic children, I think, oftentimes feel like, you know, you hear from the teacher, well, your child isn't focused, they're not trying hard enough, they need to be more serious, and sometimes there isn't enough of an understanding that, you know, maybe, maybe it's none of those things, maybe they have a learning difference, and they need to be taught differently.
Basu: And is there anything that you think parents should know that you, that you think would be better if parents understood about the whole process, about how it is for educators and how it is for school administrators?
D’Souza: Yeah, I guess just my… I have so much more respect for… I always respect the teachers, but I have so much more respect now, that the kind of constraints a lot of teachers are under and, you know, I've talked to numerous teachers who they get a new curriculum on Monday and they're supposed to start teaching it on Tuesday. They haven't had a chance to even read it, leave aside understand it, leave aside be able to explain it to a third grader. So, I think they're sort of making the impossible possible every day. And we should all be taking our hats off to them. And, you know, teaching 30 kids at a time? Any parent who sat down to teach one child knows that's pretty challenging actually. So, I would say that. To understand the challenge for the educator is quite great. And so, it's actually a blessing for parents that they can focus on like one or two kids and what those kids need. And then also feel free to advocate. I think our system is built on advocacy. So to try and very kindly and nicely and persuasively ask for what you think your child needs.
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Basu: Karen, thank you so much for your time.
D’Souza: Thank you, it was a delightful conversation.
Basu, Narrating: Karen D’Souza is a senior writer at “EdSource.” We’ll link to some of her reporting in our show notes page.
If you’re enjoying this show, “Apple News In Conversation,” please take a second to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and give us a follow so you never miss an episode.
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