Today’s Literacy Headlines

The artist, the author, and the illustrator behind Roots and Wings: How Shahzia Sikander Became an Artist share the story of its making. “One of my early childhood memories is of an abandoned school bus converted, by volunteers in the neighborhood where I lived, into the Aleph Laila book bus library, and how my afternoons were spent perusing books,” says Shahzia.

Taking an asset-based approach to supporting students who are new to the English language can help them thrive.

An analysis released today of student scores on the test known as the “nation’s report card” helps paint a more detailed picture of the country’s struggling readers. This new report looks at results from a supplemental Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) NAEP test that a portion of 4th graders took in 2018—a test that measured their ability to read passages with speed, accuracy, and expression, as well as their word-reading ability. These 4th graders also took the main NAEP reading test, which measures reading comprehension. The researchers found that students’ reading comprehension was connected to their ability to read text fluently and accurately, and to their ability to recognize and decode words. The lower students scored on the main NAEP reading test, the harder time they had with reading fluency and foundational skills on the ORF. These results are in line with what research has shown about how skilled reading works.

Tom Loveless has long been a clear-eyed incisive critic of the Common Core State Standards. Now Loveless has published a definitive autopsy of the failed policy initiative, Between the State and the Schoolhouse: Understanding the Failure of Common Core, and the Biden administration would do well to consult the educational coroner’s report before launching their next big education initiative. Loveless sets the stage with a look back at the history of the drive for education standards. While he’s exceptionally even-handed here, the progression points to some of the earliest missteps of the Core creators. For example, previous standardization attempts were slow and ungainly because so many different stakeholders with so many different concerns bogged down the process. The Common Core solution? Just don’t let all those people in the room.

Bob Slavin’s sudden death from a heart attack at the age of 70 last week sent a shock through the K-12 world. The renowned education researcher at Johns Hopkins University and co-founder of the Success for All Foundation with his wife, Nancy Madden, was still a formidable force in pushing for policies to support the nation’s students and ensure those most likely to struggle with learning had access to effective instruction and school services. His latest campaign, which Slavin outlined in a letter to President-elect Joe Biden a few days after the election, called for a “Marshall Plan” for tutoring. Slavin was anticipating the likelihood of millions of children in high-poverty schools falling further behind their peers as a result of the pandemic. He saw a massive mobilization of tutors and resources to bolster classroom learning as an effective strategy for tackling the problem.

A mobile app was successful at distinguishing toddlers diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) from typically developing toddlers based on their eye movements while watching videos, according to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health. The findings suggest that the app could one day screen infants and toddlers for ASD and refer them for early intervention, when chances for treatment success are greatest.

This summer will be crucial for catching up students who have fallen behind due to the pandemic and school closures, experts say. Districts are bolstering their summer learning offerings, and the federal government has given more than a billion dollars to help them do so. But there’s one big problem: Teachers are burned out and exhausted from a year of pandemic teaching. And many are saying thanks but no thanks to the offer of teaching summer school.

Explicit writing instruction not only improves students’ writing skills but also helps build and deepen their content knowledge, boosts reading comprehension and oral language ability, and fosters habits of critical and analytical thinking. The process of planning, writing, and revising can be taught in intentional, sequential steps. In following this process, students can improve their skills and overall comprehension and retention of information.[1] It’s imperative that schools not scrimp on writing instruction as they help students recover from the pandemic. To be effective, writing should be embedded in the content of the core curriculum and begin at the sentence level.

An international team of more than 50 language acquisition researchers has recently released a comprehensive study on the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on early language acquisition and how lockdown measures affected infants and toddlers’ vocabulary development. The researchers found that children whose parents read to them often and limited their screen time were more likely to have significant improvements throughout the lockdown than those whose parents did not. “… the results suggest that who you are (your education, your child’s age or sex) does not predict vocabulary development as much as what you did with your child during lockdown.”

It’s been a year since teachers were handed an unprecedented request: Educate students in entirely new ways, amid the backdrop of a global pandemic. In this comic series, we’ll illustrate one educator’s story each week from now until the end of the school year. Episode 6: Librarian Emily Curtis and bus driver Edwin Steer of Georgetown, Texas, discuss creating places of “peace and security” by delivering books to students who can’t be in school.

The Bank Street Center for Children’s Literature (CLL) has named Your Place in the Universe by Jason Chin its 2021 Cook Prize winner. The Cook Prize has been awarded annually since 2012 to the best STEM picture book. It is the only national award chosen by children that honors a STEM title. The young readers enjoyed learning about the size of the universe and their place in it. “It shows you where you are in the whole world from an eight-year-old boy to beyond the Milky Way,” said Dylan, who is in third grade. “It keeps getting further and further and deeper into space.”