A recent National Assessment of Educational Progress found that only about one-third of American elementary school students are reading at grade level, which has many schools rethinking how they teach kids to read.
In a first-grade classroom in New York City, Melissa Jones Diaz teaches her students the specific rules that make up the English language, letter by letter. For decades, most schools saw no need to explicitly teach kids these rules, preferring to give students time to read with the belief that they would figure it out on their own.
Nowadays, specific, detailed instruction is the norm.
“This was a major shift in my teaching approach and my understanding of how students learn to read,” Jones-Diaz said.
The Science of Reading is better known as a grassroots movement rather than a curriculum, which argues that phonics – the relationship between letters and sounds – is the key to learning to read and write.
The movement, driven by parents who believe the old system is leaving their children behind, is rapidly changing the way reading is taught.
Thirty-nine states and Washington, DC, have passed laws or enacted regulations requiring schools to follow a “science of reading” approach.
That usually means new books with an emphasis on phonics and new teacher training.
Jason Borges oversees New York City's new reading program, which was partially implemented last year and is set to be in all classrooms this fall.
“What we were doing wasn't working,” Borges said. “Fifty-one percent of students were not proficiency-level or even close to proficiency-level.”
Older approaches, such as having children look at pictures in a book and guess the word, or make queues, are being phased out as new methods become more popular.
Instead, students can now be taught to ignore the pictures and focus on the groups of letters when flipping through a picture book.
Research suggests that this new approach works, but the effects are modest: A recent Stanford study found that two years of doing it was as effective as an extra quarter of studying.
Implementing the changes can also be difficult, and we are still figuring out how far to push the changes.
“This isn't just about phonics, right? There's so much more that goes into teaching how to read, so I'm worried that we're going a little too far and not just narrowing it down to phonics,” Borges said.
The nation's largest school system is trying to strike that balance and eagerly awaits test results.