Today’s Literacy Headlines

As states rush to address falling literacy scores, a new kind of education debate in state legislatures is taking hold: not whether reading instruction needs fixing, but how to fix it. A bipartisan wave of state-level changes to the ‘science of reading’ is gaining momentum. However, the “science of reading” has met resistance in other states. In California, legislation that would require phonics-based reading instruction statewide has faced opposition from English learner advocates who argue that a one-size-fits-all approach may not effectively serve multilingual students.

As microschools and similarly personalized educational models spread quickly across the U.S., visionary educators working within traditional public schools are taking notice. These “intrapraneurs” are embracing the spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation that is fueling the growth of new schools and learning spaces in the private sector, and they are bringing that enterprising attitude to their own schools and school districts. George Philhower is one of them. As Superintendent of the Eastern Hancock public school district in rural Charlottesville, Indiana, Philhower first heard about microschooling during the Covid pandemic, and saw the growing appeal of these smaller, more flexible learning communities that tailor curriculum and instruction to each child’s individual needs. He began to wonder if there was a way to bring the microschooling model into the public school system.

Today’s challenges are increasingly urgent and complex. Learner gaps. Enrollment shifts. Educator shortages. Political flashpoints. Family demands. And beneath it all, a widening chasm between what students experience in school and what they need to thrive in a world shaped by automation, AI, and accelerating change. Public microschools offer a focused, actionable path forward in this era of uncertainty and opportunity. These small, purpose-built, learning environments give public schools and their communities the power to design experiences that are deeply personalized, flexible, and malleable without waiting for entire systems to shift. They can serve students, empower educators, and address community needs.

As states pass laws requiring schools to follow the “science of reading,” one aspect of these policies has stirred up particular controversy: Holding back struggling readers who don’t reach proficiency by the end of 3rd grade. Some research shows that states with these retention policies have seen bigger student test-score increases than states without them. Now, a new study suggests that the benefit to kids doesn’t actually come from having them repeat a grade. Instead, it stems from the extra reading support that’s unlocked when students are flagged for retention.

While the new law, which comes with no funding, won’t immediately require schools to screen kindergarten through third grade students for signs of dyslexia, it marks another milestone in the state’s ongoing campaign to boost reading proficiency among Colorado students. Over the last seven years, state leaders have cracked down on debunked reading curriculum, required more training for elementary teachers and principals, and held teacher prep programs to higher standards for how they train future elementary educators to teach reading.

Elisha Cooper, a Caldecott honoree and a winner of the New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Book Award, is the author, most recently, of “Here Is a Book.” In this essay she says, “In the work of artists I admire, all the training and discipline come out in an act of letting go: a splotch of ink, a wayward wash of color.”

New research addresses unresolved issues, such as exactly how to teach reading once students have learned phonics and how to decode the words on the page. “Early research showed that background knowledge plays a part,” said Kausalai Wijekumar, a professor of education at Texas A&M University, who has been studying reading instruction and recently produced a study that sheds more light on the debate. “If we want all the children to read, we have proven that they can be taught with the right strategies,” said Wijekumar. She has a body of research to back her position.

Scientists are developing tools to discover the spectacular processes behind infant and toddler brain and language development. As never before, scientists have access to experimental methods and machines that enable them to understand the neural mechanisms occurring as babies become children and learn to navigate their environment. With every scientific discovery, wonder deepens. The following stories offer a glimpse into some of the extraordinary research at the heart of these discoveries.  

Burgess is an award-winning author and poetry teacher and Salati is a Caledecott Medalist. They now have an illustrated book of poetry called Words with Wings and Magic Things. “One of the ways I describe this book is Shel Silverstein meets Rumi for kids,” says Burgess, who remembers discovering Silverstein’s poetry when he was a child. The poems run the gamut. There’s a dragon piñata, a hungry yeti, primordial slime, a terrible, horrible idea, serious questions, dancing, and some magic tricks.

Charter school founder Matthew Levey shared some thoughts about what he saw this spring while observing some Louisiana classrooms. “Bayou Bridges, which the Louisiana education department developed in partnership with the Core Knowledge Foundation, knits together history, geography, civics, and economics to build student knowledge and literacy skills in grades K-8. In Ouachita Parish, teachers use Bayou Bridges alongside two ELA curricula, Louisiana Guidebooks and Core Knowledge Language Arts, that my colleagues at the Knowledge Matters Campaign recognize as content-rich and based on the science of reading.”

In teaching, a field often beset by burnout and high turnover, TK stands out as a joyous and messy world of puzzles, finger painting and puppet theater, a world unique from the rest of the K-12 system. This fall, California’s long-awaited vision of universal pre-kindergarten finally comes to fruition as transitional kindergarten, or TK, becomes accessible to all 4-year-olds across the state. Many hope that increasing access to preschool may be one of the keys to closing the state’s ever-widening achievement gap. 

In my nearly two decades first as a classroom teacher then a teacher trainer, I have found the following three scaffolding strategies highly effective: active reading strategies (such as cloze, partner, and choral); background knowledge activation; and peer-assisted learning. A caution: Let’s remember that scaffolding is not differentiation. When we scaffold our instruction, we are giving students access to grade-level material without altering the grade-level expectations. 

Districts must develop comprehensive action plans that start in the schools and extend into students’ homes. Here are three ways they can start: 1(1) lead with empathy and understanding; (2) establish holistic wraparound services; and (3) reengage parents and caregivers in their children’s education.

Seven former National Ambassadors for Young People’s Literature today announced their opposition to the Trump administration’s removal of the Librarian of Congress. Librarian Carla Hayden was fired from the role without justification on May 8, and Robert Newlen is the acting Librarian at this time. Past ambassadors Jon Scieszka, Katherine Paterson, Kate DiCamillo, Gene Luen Yang, Jacqueline Woodson, Jason Reynolds, and Meg Medina all signed a joint statement.

Morphemes are important because knowing how they work helps us understand both familiar and unfamiliar words. For instance, you can probably make sense of words like yellowness and quickify, even if you’ve never heard or used them before. The fact that we can interpret new words like these so easily shows that we’ve developed knowledge about how morphemes work. But what we don’t fully understand is how this sensitivity to word structure is acquired in the first place. That’s what we set out to explore in this project. We analysed every word in 1,200 books popular among British children and young people aged 7–16 to assess how experience with these words might support the learning of morphemes. What we found was surprising!

STEM activities are the perfect way for students to practice problem-solving, teamwork, growth mindset, and resilience. All of these skills are vital to student success in school, in their future workplace, and in life. Teachers can build an engaging STEM program on a limited budget by going slowly and adding one activity at a time—which also gives them time to learn.

Next To Me is a children’s book with a simple but joyful premise: a child and a mom walk home from school and notice things. As the child and mom walk home from school, they notice a big tree next to a red car. They notice a twisty slide next to swinging swings. Next to big kids playing basketball. When they get home, they notice what’s for dinner and who is making it. They notice bubbles in the bath. After dinner and a bath, it’s time to get ready for bed. Things wind down and get cozy. Instead of noticing and seeing, the child starts feeling — the blankets and stuffed animals.

New Jersey’s new, first-of-its-kind literacy plan aims to boost early reading skills among young learners, but advocates worry schools won’t be ready to roll it out this fall. The statewide effort aims to refine foundational literacy practices in schools based on research in reading and learning. The bills called on school districts to implement literacy screenings for students in K-3, create reading intervention plans, and start new training on reading instruction for pre-K-6 staff starting this upcoming school year.

Aside from the soothing, calming effects of being read to, research on the importance of reading aloud to children from an early age finds that read-aloud experiences not only expand children’s vocabulary but also help develop their social and emotional and creative and critical thinking skills.

Missing school isn’t just a high school issue. Parents’ failures make kindergarten another chronic absenteeism peak, sometimes nearing 90%. Ohio State University professor Arya Ansari, who specializes in early childhood education, called kindergarten absenteeism “problematic” because missed classes add up over the years. “Kids who missed school in kindergarten do less well academically in terms of things like counting, letters, word identification, language skills.., they do less well in terms of their executive function skills, and they do less well socially and behaviorally,” Ansari said. 

I did it 2013. I did it in 2017. Now eight years have passed and it’s time to do it again. On a periodic basis I enjoy collecting all the statues of children’s literature characters in America that I can find. Sit back and enjoy this listing of all the statues I could find, with a couple new inclusions as well. And if you know of a statue that isn’t listed here, suggest it! I’m happy to keep adding on.

Students of all ages are at risk for “summer slide.” The good news is that this seasonal phenomenon, where academic skills are lost or forgotten during the long summer break, is not inevitable. Here are a few strategies that parents can use to help their students confidently return to the classroom in fall, starting with: visit the library once a week.

Proposed cuts to federal funding for local libraries could end essential services for Michigan students, particularly in rural and impoverished communities, according to state officials. The Trump administration’s proposed 2025-26 budget would eliminate the federal department that provides funds to state library agencies. The cuts would mean the loss of nearly $4.8 million for the Library of Michigan, as well as grants that support Native American libraries in the state. The funding provides services that support K-12 students, such as early literacy programs, as well as access to the internet, technology, testing materials, tutorials, and online databases. Potential cuts to statewide library services come as the number of school librarians in the state are dwindling and gaps in student literacy achievement are widening.

As a fifth-grade teacher, I’ve seen firsthand how podcasts can completely change the way students engage with literacy. I started using them not just as something to listen to, but as a tool to allow students to create—and it’s been a game changer. Whether we’re analyzing podcast episodes for comprehension or producing our own podcast debates on topics like renewable energy, students are thinking more critically, collaborating more deeply, and finding confidence in their voices. Podcasts have given my students, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds, a powerful way to express themselves and connect with others. It’s one of the most engaging and empowering tools I’ve brought into my classroom.

When Angela Dominguez took the helm of Donna Independent School District in Texas in 2021, she thought the district’s original decision to use most of its federal Elementary and Secondary School Relief (ESSER) money to pay for existing fourth- and fifth-grade teacher positions was short-sighted. “I was like, ‘Did you guys think that we were going to just do without fourth and fifth grade after ESSER?’” she recalled. Dominguez had a longer term vision for the remaining rounds of pandemic emergency funding: Hire teaching assistants for early elementary classrooms to help the district’s youngest learners, who were struggling with math and reading as a result of uneven exposure to school during remote learning.

Half of Minnesota students can’t read at grade level, according to statewide test scores. Two years ago, the Legislature took that as a lesson and overhauled the standards of how kids are taught to read. In St. Paul Public Schools, teachers and administrators who began transitioning literacy instruction during the pandemic before lawmakers mandated the change say they are already seeing results, providing a glimpse into how the state is poised to the page on lagging test scores in the years to come. The approach of the READ Act is rooted in “the science of reading,” which is a body of research that shows the most effective strategies focus on explicit instruction on phonics and teaching students to decode different parts of words to make sense of them.

How did 11 large, urban K–12 districts manage to add librarians and increase library services for their students when the U.S. is experiencing a decades-long decline in school librarian staffing? The School District of Philadelphia and the volunteer advocacy organization Philadelphia Alliance to Restore School Librarians teamed up to find out—and to create a replicable model that they and other districts could use to achieve similar success. The recently released report Restoring Librarians: Challenges and Strategies, details how the districts overcame major hurdles and beat the odds.

Year-round schooling, which gained popularity in the 1970s, avoids long summer vacations in which students can forget much of what they learned during the school year. Under the plan, students attend classes as part of a normal grading period most of the summer. Their school years aren’t much longer than with a traditional schedule, just spread out differently, with their lost summer vacation days added to other breaks during the school year. Cleveland’s move comes as some states like South Carolina and Florida have recently embraced or are trying out the approach, along with districts hoping to address pandemic learning loss. 

NCES and IES, as we’ve known them, are unlikely to return. While that’s regrettable in many respects, it also opens the door to build something stronger—an independent entity that can carry forward NCES’s essential mission without being subject to political impulses and whims of the day. And importantly, we wouldn’t be starting from scratch. By updating and improving on the NCES model, we can lay the groundwork for a new cooperative, interstate research institution.

Have you ever watched your students ace grammar worksheets only to see those same skills vanish in their writing? You’re not alone! When I discovered mentor texts for grammar instruction, everything changed in my classroom. Think of mentor texts as your grammar instruction’s best friends. They’re amazing pieces of writing that showcase the grammar concepts you want to teach. While published authors create beautiful, effective writing, they often bend grammar rules for stylistic purposes. This created a dilemma for me. I loved using authentic texts, but I needed to teach standard grammar conventions. What to do?

The author, illustrator and animator, 57, is best known for his bestselling picture books like the Caldecott Award-winning “Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!” and “Knuffle Bunny.” His latest book, “Will the Pigeon Graduate?” may look like it’s aimed at children, but the titular Pigeon’s fear of failure and an uncertain future are sure to resonate with people of all ages, especially during graduation season. Willems and his trusty friend The Pigeon (charmingly represented by puppeteer Bradley Freeman Jr.) recently sat down with The Associated Press for an interview about graduating, “Sesame Street,” and the purpose of life. Answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.

A Wonder Wall can shape learning experiences, cultivate confidence, and develop essential critical thinking skills in kindergarten students. A Wonder Wall is a visual and interactive space where children’s questions about the world around them are displayed. As students engage in classroom activities, they are encouraged to ask questions, which are added to the Wonder Wall. These questions serve as the foundation for our classroom discussions and projects.

Universal pre-K, an ambitious social program usually championed by progressives, has been in place in one of the most conservative US states since 1998. Oklahoma’s universal pre-K program was just the second in the country (behind Georgia) and has since become a model for how these programs can boost school readiness, economic well-being, and community health.

Early years English language learners (ELLs) are embarking on an exciting journey—learning a new language while navigating the world around them. It’s a remarkable adventure as they develop communication skills and engage with academic concepts at the same time. Project-based learning (PBL) offers an excellent way to support this process, providing opportunities for hands-on exploration, meaningful collaboration, and growth in both social and academic realms within a language-rich environment.

“The Village Beyond the Mist,” published in Japan in 1975, arrives in a crisp English translation by Avery Fischer Udagawa. Its eight brisk chapters tell the story of a Brigadoon-type settlement whose location is unverifiable because it is cloaked by vapors. Promotional copy advertises this novel as the story that inspired Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece film “Spirited Away.” We’ll return to this. First things first: Sachiko Kashiwaba’s novel is indeed transporting.

Reading Reset is an investigative series shedding light on the potential origin of the state’s poor reading proficiency, its impact on children, the criminal justice system, and possible solutions.

Cursive handwriting is making a comeback of sorts for K-8 students in the United States. Several states in recent years passed legislation mandating instruction in cursive handwriting, including California, Iowa and Oklahoma. Pennsylvania and New Jersey are considering similar legislation, as are other states. I’m an associate professor of special education and the director of the Iowa Reading Research Center. At the center, we’re conducting a systematic review of prior research to improve cursive handwriting instruction. We also want to know how learning cursive affects the development of reading and writing skills.

Tyreek Wiggins struggled to read anything longer than three-letter words at the start of this school year. But with the help of his Joyful Readers tutor Kirra Silver, Tyreek — a third grader at Philadelphia’s Mastery Prep Elementary Charter School — quickly began gaining confidence. Joyful Readers is one of the 28 AmeriCorps programs across Pennsylvania that has been gutted by DOGE. While tutors will finish out this school year, its future is now uncertain. Cuts to AmeriCorps have also affected student tutoring programs elsewhere.

More states are embracing microcredentials as a form of professional development for teachers that’s self-paced, ideally hands-on, and customizable to the skills they want to build or the subject areas they want to teach. It’s a change that’s happening gradually, and it’s one that experts say can help make professional development more relevant for educators and a tool that districts can use to retain top talent.

Lessons focused on science, technology, engineering, arts, and math give young learners an engaging way to explore new concepts. I discovered that successful STEAM activities require flexible planning, thoughtful facilitation, and differentiation for a mixed-age classroom with varying skill sets. 

New research shows fewer than half of parents find it fun to read aloud to their children. But reading aloud is one of the sacred, analog rituals of parenting. “CBS Evening News” co-anchor John Dickerson has more.

After months of intense debate, a citywide education panel voted Wednesday night to close a Brooklyn school with dwindling enrollment and open a new one for struggling readers in its place. And the panel greenlit opening a new school, the Central Brooklyn Literacy Academy, in the same building. It will be the second city-operated public school designed to serve students with dyslexia and other reading challenges.

Through an arduous summer of hiking, 13-year-old Finn Connelly finds common ground with his late firefighter father in Kate Messner’s new verse novel. “The Trouble With Heroes” is a timely, enduring story that reminds us that even the toughest fathers carry emotions worth sharing. What a gift it would be if more boys, and more young people in general, had access to our vulnerability.

Less than half of parents find it fun to read aloud to their children, new research shows. Only 40% of parents with children aged 0 to 13 agreed that “reading books to my child is fun for me”, according to a survey conducted by book data company Nielsen and publisher HarperCollins. The survey shows a steep decline in the number of parents reading aloud to young children, with 41% of 0- to four-year-olds now being read to frequently, down from 64% in 2012. Gen Z parents are more likely than millennial or Gen X parents to say that children’s reading is “more a subject to learn than a fun thing to do”. HarperCollins said that parents in this age group grew up with technology themselves, so may think “fun comes more from digital entertainment than from books”.

In Assistant Teaching Professor Jill Jones’ classroom, a group of college students decode multisyllabic words. With the guidance of a classmate, they identify word elements, such as the prefix, suffix and root, in order to determine the word’s meaning. The room is filled with pre-service teachers in the NC State College of Education’s elementary education program. The exercise is helping them determine words in a passage that fourth grade students might find challenging, and, with the help of Jones, giving them an opportunity to practice how they would work with young students to decode those words. After practicing this routine in the classroom, they go on to implement these practices in lessons they design for elementary students in their field experience classroom.

The final days of the school year offer an opportunity to ensure that students conclude the year feeling accomplished, connected to you and each other, and ready for future challenges. Teachers can help students end the year on a high note with activities that remind them how much they’ve learned in class.

I didn’t expect a podcast to unravel parts of my professional identity — but then I listened to Sold a Story, an exposé of missteps in reading instruction and the inherent consequences. Schools and educators need to rethink the way they teach reading and emphasize decoding, professional development and support for parents.

In schools beginning a new reading journey, school leaders need to understand that selecting a curriculum is only one aspect of good reading instruction. We are asking teachers to make this titanic shift and to learn new methodologies and skills on the go. As an education community, to truly be successful with the transition to the science of reading, we need to make sure there is still room for it to partner with the art of teaching. The art of teaching requires the teacher to see the child at the center of the curriculum.

Overall, the report suggests Colorado has prioritized quantity over quality as it moved from a small tuition-free preschool program for children with certain risk factors to one that’s open to all 4-year-olds. The state’s universal preschool enrollment numbers are impressive, with 70% of eligible children enrolled last year. But Colorado’s showing deteriorated in the quality standards department. In the latest report, it meets only two of 10 benchmarks, down from four in the previous preschool program. The benchmarks, which describe state policies that promote high-quality classrooms, touch on factors such as teacher training, curriculum, and class size.

Tom Angleberger is the author of the popular Origami Yoda series and the Flytrap Files series, as well as several other books for kids. The fear of failure is so huge for poetry. Before we start, we’re thinking about Emily Dickinson and Rita Dove and Robert Frost and Nikki Giovanni and we will never be that good! Anything we write will be cringeworthy by comparison! But why are we comparing? And why are we cringing? And, most importantly, why aren’t we writing the ding dang poem? If this is where you’re stuck, try my new Dino Poetry method.

Re “We’re Just Not as Good at Thinking Anymore,” by David Brooks (column, April 11): As a former teacher, professor and principal, I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Brooks’s warning about the dangers of incuriosity and the astoundingly low reading levels of many Americans. He said what thousands of American teachers have been warning for years. Without advanced reading skills and a dedication to educational development, higher-level thinking cannot exist. Information is everything to a society. Having that knowledge cannot be achieved without understanding that reading is essential. 

Screen time permeates the lives of toddlers and preschoolers. As many parents will know, research points to several negative effects of screen time. As scholars who specialize in speech pathology and early childhood development, we are particularly interested in the recent finding that too much screen time is associated with less parent-child talk, such as fewer conversational turns between parents and children. As a result, the American Academy of Pediatrics and World Health Organization suggest limiting screen time for children. Beyond quantity, they also emphasize the quality of a child’s engagement with digital media. Used in moderation, certain kinds of media can have educational and social benefits for children – and even contribute to language development. These tips may help parents structure and manage screen time more effectively.

The $190 billion earmarked for school districts to recover from the pandemic was supposed to trickle out by the end of this school year. Instead, districts reliant on the funding had their access abruptly cut off on March 28, when the U.S. Department of Education informed state education chiefs that continuing to fund pandemic recovery in schools no longer met the department’s priorities. For some districts, this means that essential student services like intensive tutoring, social-emotional supports, and plans for summer school programs have come to a screeching halt. The sudden decision has left districts struggling to honor their payments to third-party vendors they had contracted to tutor students or provide curricula, among other commitments.

The schools in Steubenville, Ohio, are doing something unusual—in fact, it’s almost unheard of. In a country where nearly 40 percent of fourth graders struggle to read at even a basic level, Steubenville has succeeded in teaching virtually all of its students to read well. Reporter Emily Hanford shares the latest from the hit APM Reports podcast Sold a Story. We’ll learn how Steubenville became a model of reading success—and how a new law in Ohio put it all at risk. 

On March 20, 2025, the president of the United States signed an executive order to shutter the U.S. Department of Education. As part of this effort, the Office of Education Technology (OET) responsible for developing national education technology plans and resources was eliminated along with its resources. OET provided federal guidance on emerging technologies via resources such as the 2024 National Educational Technology Plan, toolkits for educators on using artificial intelligence, and data gathered from OET convenings and listening sessions. These resources provide states and districts with evidence-based edtech guidance, particularly as they navigate emerging technology and concerns such as student data privacy in artificial intelligence. Although guidance and resources from the former OET office will need to be updated in time, we have made the resources available below.

These portable science labs allow young children to investigate the world around them, all year long. Wonder Wagons can be rolled to different locations, including an outdoor classroom, forest or wooded area, pond, garden, park, nature trail, or playground, or even on the sidewalk while strolling around the block. Students gather at their destination and grab their desired tools from the Wonder Wagon. They can make the most of their outdoor learning experience when they are given ample time to really explore the space and take a closer look.

Sage and Scribe is a cooperative learning activity that gives every student a chance to be both an expert and a learner. In Kait Hudson’s first-grade class at Barbara Morgan STEM Academy in Boise, Idaho, she uses this simple partner exercise for a variety of academic tasks. In addition to dedicated time to practice a skill, this cooperative learning activity also provides an opportunity for peer feedback. Watch the video.

For many, the “science of reading” has become synonymous with phonics instruction. The idea that the “science” in reading instruction only supports phonics instruction has been “hard to dislodge,” said Maria Murray, the founder and CEO of the Reading League, an organization that advocates for evidence-based reading instruction, at its annual summit in Chicago this week. But at this and other recent events, the Reading League is intentionally bringing in panelists to discuss language development, reading comprehension, and the various social and cultural factors that influence students’ ability to learn to read well.

When I heard that “Strega Nona” is turning 50, I did what any self-respecting book lover would do: I heated up a bowl of pasta and paid the signora a visit. I remembered Tomie dePaola’s Caldecott Honor-winning picture book for the same reasons you might: oodles of noodles pouring out of a cauldron, threatening to overtake a Calabrian village rendered in soothing earth tones; panicked locals; the titular grandmother sorceress who saves the town. But the character who caught my eye on my anniversary reading hasn’t inspired a postage stamp, a TikTok trend or a D.I.Y. Halloween costume. His name is Big Anthony, and he’s the awkward, galumphing antihero who makes “Strega Nona” possible. Yes, he causes a boatload of trouble. I still think we should give him a second chance.

A new study by the research group RAND Corp. suggests primary teachers in states with comprehensive early literacy laws—those that include pre- and in-service teacher training and curriculum requirements for teaching foundational reading skills—are more likely to give students evidence-based strategies for tackling text than those in states with laxer laws. But in many cases, K-2 teachers continued to use some classroom materials that did not meet standards for teaching foundational reading skills in phonics, phonemic awareness, and fluency—though many of them mixed them with materials that did address those topics. In all, the findings paints a mixed picture of the implementation of “science of reading” laws—or at the very least, an incomplete shift in teachers’ practice.