According to a recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, only one-third of elementary school students in the United States are reading proficiently. In response, many schools are rethinking how they teach children to read.
In a first-grade classroom in New York City, Melissa Jones-Diaz teaches letter-by-letter the specific rules that make up the English language. For decades, most schools felt it was unnecessary to teach children these rules explicitly, preferring instead to give students time with books, assuming they would likely figure them out on their own.
Now, specific and detailed instructions take precedence.
“It represented a big shift in my teaching, in my understanding of how students learn to read,” Jones-Diaz said.
The science of reading is not so much a curriculum as a popular movement best known for advocating the idea that phonics, or the relationship between letters and their sounds, is essential to learning to read.
The movement is being driven by parents who believe the old system has left their children behind, and it is rapidly transforming the way reading is taught.
In 39 states and Washington, DC, laws have been passed or rules have been established requiring schools to follow the science of reading approach.
This usually means new books and new teacher training focused on phonics.
Jason Borges oversees New York City’s new reading program, which began with a partial rollout last year and will be in every classroom this fall.
“What we were doing wasn’t working,” Borges said. “Fifty-one percent of the students were not at the required level and weren’t close to it.”
As new methods take over, old approaches like queuing (where children look at pictures in a book to guess the word) are being supplanted.
Instead, when students flip through picture books, they are now taught to ignore the pictures and focus instead on the letter groups.
Research shows that this new method is effective, but only modestly. A recent Stanford study showed that two years of using this method was equivalent to one additional quarter of learning.
Implementing changes may also be difficult, and how far to push these changes remains to be seen.
“It’s not just about phonetics, right? There’s so much more to be learned by reading that I worry that not only is it being too reductive, by limiting it to phonetics, but it’s also being pushed a little too far,” Borges said.
The nation’s largest school system is trying to find that balance, and the test results will be eagerly awaited.
