Today’s Literacy Headlines

The most practical approach for schools and districts that wish to take a knowledge-building approach to literacy is adopting one of the few published curricula explicitly designed to build knowledge, such as Core Knowledge, Wit & Wisdom, or EL Education. While such programs do not necessarily align within a grade level to the science and social studies being taught in each state, these curricula do tend to align vertically from one grade level to the next. And all promote thoughtful knowledge-building through reading complex, grade-level texts. States could play a critical role in supporting students’ knowledge-building. Here’s how. First, states could look across their academic standards and build a “knowledge map” of the big topics students are expected to learn in each grade level across content areas.

Almost all American teachers supplement their core curriculum (if they even have one) with materials they gather from the internet. National surveys show that supplementation is a growing phenomenon, and that many teachers use supplementary materials in large proportions of their lessons. While we know that supplementation is widespread, and we have a good handle on what websites teachers rely on, we don’t really know what kinds of materials teachers seek out and whether they are any good. A new study looked at the quality of more than 300 of the most-downloaded high school English language arts (ELA) materials on three popular websites: TeachersPayTeachers, ShareMyLesson, and ReadWriteThink. The reviewers built a rubric to measure the quality of the materials along multiple dimensions, and we recruited ELA experts to help evaluate the materials. The report, “The Supplemental Curriculum Bazaar: Is What’s Online Any Good?” is published today. Here’s what they learned.

1919 was an explosive year in American history: molasses flooded the town of Boston; women fought for the right to vote; lynchings of African Americans led to the birth of the civil rights movement; the World Series experienced a shocking scandal. Martin W. Sandler is known for his excellent work in documenting the history of America. This November, the award-winning author earned the 2019 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for 1919: The Year That Changed America. SLJ spoke to him about his newly bestowed honor, his creative inspiration, and his research process.

On a daily basis, every teacher navigates a wealth of questions about words and about the world. The English dictionary is replete with over half a million words, and many of our pupils can struggle to stay afloat as they swim in this sea of academic language. Given the sheer breadth and depth of vocabulary of the English language—alongside how critical it proves in mediating the academic curriculum of school—it is crucial that every teacher has a confident understanding of teaching vocabulary in the classroom. We cannot teach all of the words to our pupils. Their language develops daily, inside and outside of the school gates, with reading, talk and simply existing in the world, seeing their vocabulary grow exponentially. And yet, we can better develop our pupils’ vocabulary, identify their gaps in understanding, and teach new words with a greater likelihood of success.

I am a cognitive psychologist, which means that I use science to study mental processes. Cognitive psychologists interested in the science of learning take the basic building blocks of cognitive processes—how people perceive, learn, attend to and remember information—and build teaching and learning strategies that can be tested using the scientific method. Cognitive psychologists interested in the science of learning use the laboratory-to-classroom model to conduct research. Research in my field is powerful for educators because it yields insight about what causes students to learn. That understanding allows teachers and administrators to apply evidence-based teaching and learning strategies flexibly in the classroom.

During winter, I start thinking ahead to summer. Those of us who work in public libraries, specifically youth services, know that summer is our busiest time of the year. School is out, and we have reading clubs to run and extra programming to offer. We’re also aware that some of our young patrons spend the entire day at the library while their parents work, and that, over the course of the day, they may fill themselves up on candy—or nothing at all. For this reason, many U.S. libraries, including my employer, Uniondale (NY) Public Library (UPL), have partnered with food banks to provide healthy summer meals in a safe, supervised setting for young people up to age 18. Uniondale is a diverse community, and the majority of our patrons are African American, West Indian, and Hispanic. My wonderful coworkers, who hail from around the globe, volunteered to showcase their own cultures during Multicultural Storytimes. These events were filled with songs, stories, artifacts, games, and dancing.

The plan was hatched with high hopes and missionary zeal: For the first time in its history, the United States would come together to create consistent, rigorous education standards and stop letting so many school children fall behind academically. More than 40 states signed on to the plan, known as the Common Core State Standards Initiative, after it was rolled out in 2010 by a bipartisan group of governors, education experts and philanthropists. American children would read more nonfiction, write better essays and understand key mathematical concepts, instead of just mechanically solving equations. A decade later, after years full of foment in American schools, the performance of American students remains stagnant on the global and national exams that advocates often cited when making the case for the Common Core. The disappointing results have prompted many in the education world to take stock of the Common Core, one of the most ambitious education reform projects in American history. Some see the effort as a failure, while others say it is too soon to judge the program, whose principles are still being rolled out at the classroom level.

Before coming to the public school, I’d spent a couple years working at a tutoring center that taught, among other things, an intensive phonics program to students with reading difficulties. I’d had dozens of hours of training in several different research-based reading programs, and taught close to 100 students how to read. At the time, I figured most early-reading teachers had, at some point, had similar cognitive science-based training. But as results from two new nationally representative surveys show, that’s not the case. In preparing this reporting series, the Education Week Research Center surveyed about 670 K-2 and special education teachers and 530 education professors who teach reading courses. The findings—among the first to look at teacher and teacher-educator knowledge and practices in early reading across the country—tell an illuminating story about what’s happening in classrooms, including what teachers do and don’t know about reading and where they learned it.

Ashley Bryan has been making children’s books for almost 60 years. In 1962, he was the first African American to publish a children’s book as an author and illustrator. He was also a pioneer in creating stories centered on children about African and African American history and culture. Bryan has worked on about 50 books, including illustrating books by poet Nikki Giovanni and novelist Richard Wright. He has won the Newbery Honor, the Coretta Scott King award, and the Hans Christian Andersen award. Bryan’s passionate life and wide-ranging interests are collected in his papers. When it came time for the Ashley Bryan Center to find an appropriate repository for the archive, they looked near and far.

This year on their Best Books for Kids list, New York Public Library included a section that was just “En espanol.” It got me to thinking. On 31 Days, 31 Lists I always include a day of celebration for “bilingual books”. What do I mean by that? Well, either these are books that were originally in English and were translated to another language, or they feature both English and another language in their text.

Seaford, Delaware, was the “Nylon Capital of the World” until DuPont closed its plant. Today it has twice the rate of poverty as the rest of the state. For years, three of its four elementary schools were among the lowest performing in the state. But Stanford education professor Sean Reardon identified it as a district where African American students were learning at a faster rate than white students. That turned out to be a harbinger of enormous improvement, ushered in by superintendent Dave Perrington who assembled a team of administrators committed to equity and excellence. They brought a new approach to reading instruction and to the use of data to drive improvement. This podcast brings you the voices of Perrington, principals, teachers, and the researcher who developed their reading program, Bookworms. Where once Seaford was one of the lowest performing districts in Delaware, it now matches its performance, and its third-graders are way outperforming the state. In a diverse district that serves African American and white students and the children of relatively new immigrants from Haiti and Central America, the schools are forging a path to excellence.

In Central New York, there appears to be one shining example where systematic phonics and other proven methods are being used to teach reading with astonishing results. In the Lyncourt Union Free School District, they knew they had to do something to improve student reading proficiency in the district. Lyncourt turned to The Reading League, a non-profit organization that works to fundamentally change the way our children learn to read. They took the training into the classroom, and in just two years, from 2017 to 2019, in grades two through six, Lyncourt has seen a 31% increase in students who are reading at or above grade-level expectations and 70% of all students in those grades are now reading at or above proficiency. This 2018 to 2019 comparison shows that out of 18 school districts in Onondaga County, Lyncourt tied for first place for the largest increase in grades third through eighth ELA proficiency as measured by state testing.

Already troubled by her 4th grade students’ low reading levels, San Antonio-area teacher Melody Fernandez entered “survival mode” when she was moved down to 1st grade—and discovered the full scope of what she and many of her elementary colleagues were not prepared to teach. She had learned a lot in her preparation about reading theories, but no specific protocols for teaching the subject. So she did what many teachers new to a grade do. She used the methods more seasoned colleagues told her to use, and the curriculum on hand, which relied on leveled picture books with easily memorized, repetitive sentence structures. In all that’s been written about early literacy, little attention has been given to the cultural factors that influence how such practices are learned, reinforced, and transmitted. Yet sociology plays a major role in why they linger on in classrooms—despite evidence that they can hinder young readers’ ability to crack the code.

On every schoolyard across the world you will find games invented by children. Hand-clapping routines, rhyming stanzas and intricate rules for tiny competitions; games born of the creativity, insight and idiosyncrasy of children’s minds. In New York City’s diverse playgrounds, kids play games in Haitian Creole, Korean, Spanish, Arabic and Polish, just to name a few. Unlike nursery rhymes, lullabies, or children’s songs these games are conceived of, built upon and passed along by kids, largely by girls. Irene Chagal, who researched the history and spread of hand-clapping games for her documentary “Let’s Get the Rhythm: The Life and Times of Miss Mary Mack,” describes these games as “playground lore,” a rich body of folk literature that is just outside the attention of most adults.

Shared reading between parents and very young children, including infants, is associated with stronger vocabulary skills for nearly all children by age 3, say physicians at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. According to research published in The Journal of Pediatrics, this is true also for children who genetically may be vulnerable to barriers in learning, attention and behavior development. “In a supportive environment, children who may be genetically at-risk, do just as well as their peers,” said Manuel Jimenez, a developmental pediatrician and assistant professor of pediatrics and family medicine and community health at the medical school, who is lead author of the study.

New results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a standardized test given every two years to measure fourth- and eighth-grade achievement in reading and math, show that Mississippi made more progress than any other state. There’s no way to know for sure what causes increases in test scores, but Mississippi has been doing something notable: making sure all of its teachers understand the science of reading. To understand what the science says, a good place to start is with something called the “simple view of reading.” The simple view says that reading comprehension is the product of two things: one is your ability to decode words and the other is your ability to understand spoken language. The simple view clearly shows that focusing only on decoding would be a mistake because that’s only half the equation. Reading instruction has to include language comprehension, too. This means lessons and activities that expand children’s oral vocabularies and knowledge, so they know the meaning of the words they can decode.

Many teachers likely did not learn the cognitive science behind reading in their teacher preparation programs. While decades of research have shown that teaching young students how to crack the code of written language through systematic phonics is the most reliable way to make sure that they learn how to read words, that approach to reading has not made its way into many preservice programs. Balanced literacy dominates the nation’s colleges of education. In an Education Week Research Center survey of more than 530 professors of reading instruction, just 22 percent said their philosophy of teaching early reading centered on explicit, systematic phonics with comprehension as a separate focus. Many proponents of systematic phonics are hopeful that the tide is slowly turning—that as states pass legislation requiring teachers to be trained in the science of reading, and as school districts begin to consider teachers’ knowledge of brain-based reading principles when hiring, colleges of education will be forced to get on board.

In the literacy world, there’s a perennial concern that focusing on foundational skills will come at the expense of giving kids opportunities to practice language and enjoy stories. But researchers and educators say that it’s not only possible to teach useful vocabulary and meaningful content knowledge to young children—it’s necessary. A body of research has shown that once students can decode, their reading comprehension is largely dependent on their language comprehension—or the background and vocabulary knowledge that they bring to a text, and their ability to follow the structure of a story and think about it analytically. Before students can glean this kind of information from print, experts say, they can do it through oral language: by having conversations about the meaning of words, telling stories, and reading books aloud.

Want to know if it’s time for phonics in Belinda Williams’s kindergarten classroom? Stand in the hall and listen. “I love phonics because it’s something that’s so easy to make fun,” Williams said. “We’re always doing something very active and very musical.” Williams said her Franklin Community Schools in Franklin, Ind., uses a 90-minute reading block each day, of which 55 minutes cover phonics instruction and practice. Yet she said she usually also dedicates her personal flex time later in the day to phonics, too, with different games everyday, using magnets and Slinkies, among other activities. There’s something to be learned from teachers who end a lesson with singing and dancing students, especially when covering skills some bemoan as the most boring part of early literacy.

Virtually all teachers—including those who have embraced the overwhelming evidence supporting phonics—have been unaware that their approach to comprehension conflicts with scientific findings. They have been trained to see comprehension as a set of discrete skills, like “finding the main idea.” The most commonly used elementary literacy curricula also adopt this approach. But studies have shown that comprehension isn’t a matter of abstract skills. It’s primarily dependent on how much knowledge and vocabulary a reader has relating to the topic. In an effort to boost reading scores, many elementary and even middle schools have virtually eliminated social studies, science, and the arts to make more time for practicing “finding the main idea” on disconnected texts that don’t enable kids to acquire much knowledge. Ironically, the subjects schools have marginalized are the ones that hold the potential to boost kids’ knowledge of the world—and, ultimately, their reading comprehension.

Young children need consistent exposure to high-quality, play-based early learning experiences at home and at school for literacy and language to flourish. This is especially true for pre-K children who are dual language learners (DLLs), cultivating these fundamental skills while acquiring a second language. With particular interest in how young DLLs’ language and literacy skills develop over time, a new study compares children’s development in both English and their home language over the course of one pre-K year.

With a clear research base to back them up, leaders at Ohio’s Mad River Local Schools have paired carefully structured phonics lessons in K-2 with related practices that are known to support good reading skills: helping students build content knowledge and strong vocabularies. As the project enters its fourth year, Mad River’s leaders are hopeful. State test scores in English/language arts have risen sharply in the buildings where children have had the most exposure to the new approach, and principals notice that more students—even the struggling ones—are better at tackling tough reading passages. “The difference between now and five years ago, I wouldn’t have believed it,” said Cory Miller, the principal of Virginia Stevenson Elementary, which dove into phonics in 2013-14, four years before Mad River adopted its new phonics curriculum, Fundations. “[Students’] fluency is much better, and they’re attacking words in systematic ways,” he said. “They’re not getting stuck on words.”

There’s a settled body of research on how best to teach early reading. But when it comes to the multitude of curriculum choices that schools have, it’s often hard to parse whether well-marketed programs abide by the evidence. And making matters more complicated, there’s no good way to peek into every elementary reading classroom to see what materials teachers are using. “It’s kind of an understudied issue,” said Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can’t, and What Can Be Done About It. “[These programs] are put out by large publishers that aren’t very forthcoming. It’s very hard for researchers to get a hold of very basic data about how widely they’re used.” Now, some data are available. In a nationally representative survey, the Education Week Research Center asked K-2 and special education teachers what curricula, programs, and textbooks they had used for early reading instruction in their classrooms.

One of the most challenging aspects of properly addressing the different brains of dyslexic children is recognizing them in the first place. Dyslexia occurs on a continuum and there is no “sharp dividing line” between having dyslexia and not having it. In the early years of elementary school, all children are learning to read, and all are developing their reading skills at different rates. Though dyslexia can take on many forms, two common areas where differences can be clearly seen and heard are slow reading and difficulty with handwriting and spelling. Also, in some cases, certain speech patterns can be an early indicator of dyslexia, like mispronouncing familiar words or using “baby talk.” For schools, teachers and parents, diagnosing dyslexia in English learners can present an extra set of hurdles.

The performance of American teenagers in reading and math has been stagnant since 2000, according to the latest results of a rigorous international exam, despite a decades-long effort to raise standards and help students compete with peers across the globe. And the achievement gap in reading between high and low performers is widening. The disappointing results from the exam, the Program for International Student Assessment, were announced on Tuesday and follow those from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, an American test that recently showed that two-thirds of children were not proficient readers. About a fifth of American 15-year-olds scored so low on the PISA test that it appeared they had not mastered reading skills expected of a 10-year-old. There were some bright spots for the United States: Achievement gaps between native-born and immigrant students were smaller than such gaps in peer nations.

The Award for Innovative Literacy Promotion in Europe is presented at the European literacy conferences every other year The recipient this year was Invito alla Lettura - Rai Scuola for its aim of improving the professional development of teachers in Italy in the field of literacy. Invito alla Lettura is a distance learning program addressed to teachers of kindergarten, primary, and secondary school, and it includes three TV and web series of 30 episodes. Its main goals are improving the quality of teaching literacy and promoting good reading practices that can be replicated by classroom teachers. The program can reach a wide audience and those areas of the country where there is greater need for training, disseminating the new knowledge of literacy achieved today through international research.

The most notable picture books, middle grade and young adult books of the year, selected by The Times’s children’s books editor.

Four years ago, when the staff at Danville Primary School found out they were going to learn a new way to teach reading, Mary Levitski thought: Here we go again. The 2015 training was different. Inspired by a tutoring center for kids with dyslexia in nearby Bloomsburg, Danville adopted a new approach that involved training every teacher using a somewhat old-fashioned method. Instead of buying glossy texts, it made its own workbooks. And it worked. Danville’s method relies on new reading science. It has roots in an old way of teaching but is based on new cognitive neuroscience research that has revealed how brains process sounds and symbols. It borrows from linguistics, the study of language and its structure. Students do not memorize lists of words for spelling tests, yet the average Danville fourth grader is spelling at the sixth-grade level.

As you read this sentence, your brain is making a series of rapid choices. As it processes each word, it’s matching it to one of tens of thousands in most adults’ vocabularies — about 60,000 for a skilled reader. “When you hear a word, you somehow magically, instantly come up with the meaning of that word,” said Bob McMurray, a professor in the University of Iowa’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. All readers — and listeners — do this, McMurray said, even first-graders who typically are choosing from a mental word bank of just 3,000 to 5,000 words. Just how children learn to make such quick determinations while reading and hearing words is the focus of a new research study of McMurray’s called Growing Words.

Every year, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) throws a luncheon at its annual convention to announce the winners of two prestigious children’s book awards: the Charlotte Huck Award for Outstanding Fiction for Children and the Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children. Authors Kate and Jol Temple and illustrator Terri Rose Baynton were named winners of the 2020 Charlotte Huck Award for their novel Room on Our Rock), a story about sharing and compassion that can be read forward and backward, revealing two narratives. The Charlotte Huck Award was established in 2014 to promote and recognize fiction that has the potential to transform children’s lives by inviting compassion, imagination, and wonder. Author Barry Wittenstein and illustrator Jerry Pinkney were named winners of the 2020 Orbis Pictus Award for their nonfiction book, A Place to Land: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Speech That Inspired a Nation. The Orbis Pictus Award, established in 1989, is the oldest children’s book award for nonfiction.

In learning to read, the brain performs an amazing feat: it creates a specialized circuit that’s just for reading, forging a new circuit by combining parts of the brain that were originally designed to serve other functions, such as retrieving names. This new “reading circuit” combines processes from different areas of the brain and then runs at a speed so fast it’s nearly automatic. But not all brains forge a flowing reading circuit easily. This is the case with dyslexia. Rather than being a disease or a medical condition (the common misperception), dyslexia is a different brain organization—one in which the brain’s reading circuit has been disrupted or re-routed in at least one way, and sometimes in two or three ways. This re-routing slows down critical parts of the reading process: attaching the right sound to a letter happens more slowly and forming words or sentences takes longer, then comprehending what was just read also takes longer. Dyslexia can additionally affect memory, especially working memory, making it harder for students to remember what they just read, or directions and learning sequences.

Research shows that children whose parents are involved in supporting their learning do better in school. For English-learners, educators think that parent involvement can be especially important for supporting successful language development. But a new U.S. Department of Education fact sheet shows that English-learner families—most of whom are Latino—are far less likely to volunteer or serve on school committees and attend school or class events, important opportunities to communicate about students’ academic progress. Maria Estela Zarate, a professor in the department of educational leadership at California State University, Fullerton, has found that schools and Latino families have different perceptions of what constitutes good parental involvement. Zarate found that teachers and school administrators felt that traditional back-to-school nights, open houses, and parent-teacher conferences were important venues to communicate about students’ academic progress. The Latino families that took part in the study didn’t; they viewed educators as the experts and deferred the educational decisionmaking to them. With that in mind, here are five ideas to help schools better connect with English-learner families.

It can be hard to stay relevant in the ever-changing world of children’s entertainment, but Highlights For Children magazine has lasted for generations by sticking to the formula of mixing fun with learning. As Emily Burkhalter’s third grade class at Evening Street Elementary School in Worthington, Ohio, is enjoying a free reading period, a top choice among the students is Highlights. The kids are quick to list off their favorite parts of the magazine, from the articles to the puzzles. The most popular feature among the students is “Hidden Pictures,” the visual puzzle that challenges kids to find small pictures inside a larger scene. “Part of its appeal to young children is its lack of ambiguity,” says editor-in-chief French Cully. “I mean it’s a little black and white. It’s practice for the big, harder moral decisions that are going to come later.”

A small, kindergarten-through-8th-grade district in rural Oklahoma, Lane was identified by Sean Reardon, Professor of Poverty and Inequality at Stanford University, as one of the few districts in the country that “grow” its students almost six academic years in five calendar years. Since he identified it, Lane has improved its absolute achievement considerably. When Karin Chenoweth visited she heard from teachers and administrators that its improvement process started when its former superintendent visited a nearby high-performing high-poverty district and realized that he hadn’t understood how important early learning and early reading instruction is. He began sending teachers to learn from nearby Cottonwood and they upped their reading instruction game. Today, years later, the two districts, both located in the Choctaw Nation, continue to learn from each other. Hear directly from teachers and administrators in both Lane and Cottonwood as they talk about what they have learned from each other and how improvement takes place.

Six-year-old Kaleb Gonzalez-Muniz carried his electronic reader to a visitor in his first-grade classroom at Walter Caldwell Elementary School and announced he was reading a book about the Loch Ness monster. “This woman thought she saw one, but what if she actually saw the last plesiosaurus?” he asked, pointing at the page of the Epic! digital library book. “I love this program because of that” enthusiasm, said his teacher, Jennifer Burnett. She was Caldwell’s 2017 teacher of the year and a finalist for the Polk County school district’s top teacher that same year. Burnett was one of nine Florida teachers chosen as a Master Teacher and brand ambassador for Epic!, a company that provides unlimited in-school access to a digital catalog of more than 40,000 books, audiobooks, quizzes and educational videos in a kid-friendly platform. Epic! for Educators is provided free of charge for elementary school teachers and school librarians.

Fourth-grader Lainey Rogers put in her coin and pushed the letters and numbers on the dial pad. What Lainey did get was a surprise – a book she had never read before, and one she could call her own. The machine, called Inchy, the Bookworm Vending Machine, is the only one of its kind in the Sioux Falls School District. The vending machine doesn’t cost money, but it does take gold coins given to students for being “Hurricane Heroes,” for exhibiting kindness and good behavior. “It’s an amazing engagement tool we can use for kids. What’s been really fun to watch unfold is the investment our kids have in not only wanting to meet those Hurricane behavior expectations, but also the way they’re having conversations around books and authors.”

Glynnis Fawkes’s graphic biography of Charlotte Brontë opens with the 20-year-old aspiring writer receiving a letter from the poet Robert Southey. He warns her, “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life.” Find yourself a husband, he says; write poems on the side if you must. But creative aspirations? Forget about it. Thankfully, today’s shelves are filled with stories about and by women who wouldn’t oblige. And, as everyone knows, extraordinary women start as girls — smart, determined and chafing against society’s notions of what they should be. So it seems fitting that two new graphic novels examine what happens just before the blockbuster moment where childhood makes way for nothing less than iconhood in the making.

On the heels of a troubling “report card” on reading and math skills among American students, a global test of adult skills suggests older generations may echo those problems. The 2017 results of the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies finds that America’s adult workforce is no more skillful in reading, math, or digital problem-solving than it was five years ago, even though more students are graduating from high school. Every three years, the PIAAC measures the literacy, numeracy, and digital problem-solving skills of “working age” adults, 16 to 65, in 38 countries, including 23 in 2011-12, and another nine in 2014-15. In both math and digital problem-solving skills, U.S. adults scored significantly below the international average:

It’s official—the book world can’t get enough of audiobooks. Like everyone else, I love listening to a good story while finishing household chores. But one time, I ticked off my to-do list too fast. So, I decided to fire up my Kindle Paperwhite to read along with the narrator. Guess what, it was a eureka moment for me. After weeks of doing this, I think it facilitated my reading comprehension and made me understand the story better.

We are enjoying the early stages of a surprising and encouraging curriculum moment in education marked by robust attention and interest in scientifically-sound reading instruction. Among veteran advocates for knowledge-rich curriculum, it feels like a long overdue and welcome change in the weather. If I may offer some unsolicited advice to my fellow disciples in the cause of research-based teaching and knowledge-rich curricula: widen your lens, embrace complexity, forget top-down initiatives, counsel patience, brace yourself for years of struggle, identify your allies doing the actual work, and prepare to protect their flank. In sum, abandon single-issue curriculum advocacy, which is naïve, unrealistic, and self-defeating. It paves the way for more of the wild, fad-prone gyrations that we see over and over in this field.

Any way you say it, the latest scores from the Nation’s Report Card were bad, with trends getting worse over time. In particular, America’s lowest-performing students, who also tend to be our lowest-income children, are faring particularly poorly, especially in eighth grade, and especially in reading, but pretty much all across the board. Meanwhile, our higher-achieving students are mostly holding steady or even making gains — cause for celebration, to be sure, but also a clue as to what might be happening in schools and beyond. What might explain all this? Let me dig into three hypotheses: It’s the economy, it’s the pixels, or it’s our shift in attention away from basic skills.

Mississippi is delivering, and its students are the beneficiaries.The state proved a bright spot on the most recent Nation’s Report Card. Mississippi’s gains came as students in many states did worse in 2019 than they did in 2017 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — to the disappointment of leaders, educators and parents across the United States. Mississippi’s progress in reading, at a time when many other states’ scores are stagnant or falling, is a prime example of how a state’s long-term commitment to its goals can pay off. In 2003, the state began requiring future K-6 teachers to take two early literacy courses in their teacher-preparation training. These courses ground all new Mississippi teachers in what it takes to teach young children to read. A decade later, the state’s 2013 Literacy-Based Promotion Act focused on K-3 literacy professional development for teachers and funded literacy coaches in schools with the most students performing at low levels on the state’s literacy assessment.

HarperCollins Children’s Books will launch a Native-focused imprint, Heartdrum, in 2021. The imprint, which will be led by author Cynthia Leitich Smith and HarperCollins Children’s Books vice president and editorial director Rosemary Brosnan, plans to bring “a wide range of innovative, unexpected, and heartfelt stories by Native creators, informed and inspired by lived experience, with an emphasis on the present and future of Indian Country and on the strength of young Native heroes” to young readers, according to the publisher’s announcement. The launch list includes Ancestor Approved, an anthology edited by Smith, and The Sea in Winter by Christine Day.

A national report card finds reading proficiency for American fourth-grade and eighth-grade students is declining. We go behind the numbers to understand why, in this discussion with Liana Loewus, assistant managing editor for Education Week, Emily Hanford, senior producer and education correspondent for APM Reports, part of American Public Media, Kelly Butler, CEO of the Barksdale Reading Institute, and Nell Duke, professor at the University of Michigan School of Education focused on early literacy development.

The most successful K-3 teachers I’ve observed use small groups sparingly. That’s because their whole-class instruction consistently incorporates the most proven (but rarely implemented) elements of successful teaching. They master simple methods for ensuring that all students are attentive, and they conduct frequent, ongoing assessments of the class’s progress throughout the lesson—and then re-teach accordingly. In a two-hour reading block, five groups of students will receive about 20 minutes of reading instruction per day. In a classroom that uses small groups more sparingly, students will receive about 80 minutes—three to four times as much. This would allow for huge infusions of instructional time into the essential components of literacy.

The use of science to inform learning and development can have profound results for children, particularly those in their first few years of life. So say the experts—among them Randa Grob-Zakhary, a resident of Switzerland who holds doctoral degrees in neuroscience and medicine from Johns Hopkins University. Trained as a physician and neurosurgeon, Grob-Zakhary came to the education industry when she was pregnant with her first child, a time during which she “became acutely aware of the massive gap between what we know about children’s learning and development, and what we’re actually using,” she says. She’s currently in the process of launching Insights for Education, a consulting company to help organizations apply the evidence-based practices that we know work well. “The whole purpose is not to develop new research but to make much more use of what’s there already,” she explains. One of the many areas Grob-Zakhary wants to zero in on in her new role is early childhood education, which studies show is the most critical time in a person’s development.

East St. Louis, one of the country’s poorest cities, has been labeled the worst-performing school district in the nation. Only 73 percent of students graduate high school — compared to 89 percent in Illinois and 93 percent just across the river in Missouri. The lead poisoning and asthma rates here are some of the nation’s highest, and 43 percent of East St. Louis residents live below the poverty line. In a place where some neighborhoods have been labeled child care deserts because there are no child care centers, community leaders hope that improving early childhood education will reverse the city’s fortunes. Top-notch early learning environments have been shown to improve academic outcomes for the most vulnerable children — even years later. However, most U.S. cities and towns, including East St. Louis, still lack the funding to provide high-quality programs for all the young children who need them.

Content knowledge is coming back into vogue, and while there are plenty of cognitive science-heavy explanations out there, the basic idea is easy to grasp. If you know a lot about dinosaurs, you have an easier time reading and comprehending a book about dinosaurs. If you are trying to sound out an unfamiliar word on the page, it’s easier if you already know the word by sound. If you learn and store new information by connecting it to information you already have banked, that process is easier if you actually have plenty of information already stored away. So if we restore rich content to education and provide students with a wealth of background knowledge, will that revitalize education and fix some of the issues that have plagued us?

Our series section is a popular place for students to be. They’re going to find favorites like Dork Diaries, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and Big Nate (none of which need any boosting help from me here—I’m guessing you’re all familiar with these titles) . There are older series that are still popular, such as Horrible Harry, Animal Ark, 39 Clues, Geronimo Stilton/Thea Stilton, A-Z Mysteries, and Hank Zipzer. I’m going to run down a dozen series here that see a lot of interest and may be newer and/or less well known.

A state task force submitted recommendations to Iowa lawmakers Monday aimed at improving instruction for students with dyslexia and other struggling readers. Five to 17 percent of the population is estimated to have dyslexia. “Across Iowa, students with the characteristics of dyslexia, their families, and their teachers face many challenges, including lack of resources, lack of consistency in services across the state, and misinformation,” the task force report begins. The task force is recommending that Iowa adopt specific policies related to dyslexia, partly by building on existing policies for struggling readers. Katie Greving, a task force member and president of Decoding Dyslexia Iowa, said the group wants state education regulators to develop a dyslexia-specific teaching endorsement.

Barbershop Books is a community-based literacy program that aims to encourage young boys of color to read. The program puts a colorful book-shelf in a local barbershop that holds books curated to young boy’s tastes and provides a safe space for them to come and read in a positive environment.

Diversity, understanding bias, and the power of human kindness were main themes in all three conference keynote speeches at the recent Association of American School Librarians (AASL) National conference. Ellen Oh, author and co-founder of We Need Diverse Books, educator Adolph Brown, and graphic novelist Jarrett J. Krosoczka also spoke of the profound influence libraries had on their childhoods and lives. Brown, the former dean at Hampton University, took the stage with a swagger, dressed as “Undercover Brother,” in baggy clothes and a droopy backpack, and a floppy dreadlock wig. “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” he reminded the audience, describing how, that morning, a guard didn’t believe Brown was the AASL keynote speaker.

Records obtained by the Houston Chronicle show that thousands of elementary and middle school children in the Houston Independent School District rarely take home books from their campus library, limiting opportunities to hone literacy skills and a love for reading at a critical time in their development. In at least seven HISD schools, all of which serve predominantly low-income students, a majority of children did not check out a single book in 2018-19, the records show. The paltry checkout rates are indicative of HISD’s relatively low investment in library services, which has drawn criticism for more than a decade from librarians, literacy advocates and some district leaders.

Bright Beginnings, a nonprofit preschool in Washington, DC, was founded in 1990 by the Junior League of Washington to help children who were growing up in families experiencing homelessness. Today, Bright Beginnings embraces a two-generation approach that directs as much attention at Mom and Dad as at the child. And at grandparents, aunts and uncles, too.

In celebration of World Kindness Day, Pittsburghers — including adorable newborn babies — are wearing cardigans to honor Mister Rogers. And at Magee-Womens Hospital, it was red letter day. More accurately, it was a red sweater day. Each bundle of joy in the maternity ward was decked out in a hand-crocheted red sweaters and blue sneaker booties in honor of Fred Rogers for World Kindness Day. Mister Rogers’ wife Joanne got to meet the six adorable newborn babies.

Monique Fields has published essays touching on race and identity for mediums including NPR’s “All Things Considered” and Ebony Magazine. But “Honeysmoke,” published in January, was her first book. The book centers around the journey of a biracial girl searching to find answers to questions about her identity and ultimately concluding that though her mother is black, and her father is white, she is neither one – she is honeysmoke.

EdReports, the nonprofit curriculum reviewer, released its first reviews of foundational reading and writing skills programs on Wednesday — and none of the materials met the evaluator’s highest standard. This release marks EdReports’ first foray into reviewing supplemental materials. Traditionally, the organization has only reviewed year-long, comprehensive curricula — in math, English/language arts, and science.

Memorabilia and objects have long inspired the work of writers and artists. In interviews, conversations, or emails, Daryl Grabarek of School Library Journal has learned how particular items kept close, shared, or spotted in a museum, have stirred their imaginations or brought a period, person, or idea into sharper focus. Here are some of those stories, including one about an artifact “that got away.”

Educators in search of engaging new chapter books to read aloud to their students need go no further. From titles that will ignite discussions about contemporary issues, highlight little-known true stories, or tug on the heartstrings, these books will find a place on classroom shelves.

One preschool in Spokane Valley is breaking barriers, as they hold class outside in the Dishman Hills Natural Area. This is part of a pilot project the Washington State Department of Children, Youth and Families is testing out.