Today’s Literacy Headlines

Research shows reading graphic novels leads to improved reading and comprehension skills for all students. And studies demonstrate that children and teenagers who read graphic novels have improved, more positive attitudes towards reading. They are more likely than children who don’t read comics and graphic novels to think of themselves as good readers. This is extremely important: rates of reading for pleasure among young people are on the decline in Australia and around the world, along with a decline in literacy skills. A proven way to get young readers to both re-engage with reading for pleasure and improve their literacy is to allow – even encourage – them to engage with reading that fits their tastes and interests, linking reading to media they “already recognise as part of their cultural life”. Graphic novels are part of this solution.

Today, nearly every state has passed some manner of reading law valorizing “SoR.” Districts have adopted new curricula. Teachers are taking LETRS and other training programs in droves. Cueing and balanced literacy, once dominant in elementary school classrooms, have come under overdue scrutiny and in some cases have been banned by law. Even former skeptics now speak the language of structured literacy, decoding, and evidence-based practice. In that sense, the science of reading has won the argument. But a new Fordham Institute report asks the more important question: Has the science of reading won the classroom? The answer, encouragingly, is somewhat. But only somewhat.

Children are born to play. Play itself is a valuable, natural means for learning. But what happens when we invite them to pause and reflect on their play experiences? Intentional play reflection is a developmentally appropriate and powerful tool for building metacognitive skills in children. Early childhood teachers can use the strategies and questions in this article to unobtrusively guide students to develop metacognition.

Children’s executive function skills need to play a game of catch-up, concludes a new research study. The study puts the blame on the pandemic, when those skills grew at a lower rate than is developmentally typical. Stephanie M. Jones, the lead researcher, is a professor of early childhood development at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She says: Executive function is the set of cognitive skills related to attention, control, and goal-directed behaviors. There’s lots of evidence that tells us that if we support children to practice executive function and self-regulation in the context of their learning environment, if we provide the supports that enable adults and other children to form strong, tight, warm, responsive relationships, that those things will build self-regulation skills, and that cascades into positive behavior.”

The $5.6 million National Study of Special Education Spending, first announced three years ago by the Education Department under the Biden administration, seeks to give policymakers and special education administrators an updated picture of what influences special education spending under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The National Study of Special Education Spending will be the first comprehensive, federally supported look into IDEA funding in two decades.

Technology has changed the way students study and learn. Now, as artificial intelligence enters the classroom, proponents argue it will be a welcome revolution for schools — but with limited guardrails, could it do more harm than good? Horizons moderator William Brangham explores the future of AI and education with Khan Academy founder Salman Khan, who has launched a new AI assistant for teachers.

Last week, after months of petitions and demonstrations, the school board of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) voted unanimously to limit screen time for all grade levels, beginning in the fall, with a particular focus on eliminating it entirely for elementary-age students. The move is an about-face for a district that, since the pandemic, has focused on bringing technology into the classroom. The shift in the nation’s second-largest school district aligns with a flurry of recent state movement. Since January, Alabama, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia have passed some form of legislation to reevaluate technology’s role in education instruction and assessment, and more than 10 other states are considering similar restrictions.

During National Library Week, which ends Saturday, librarians across the country are fighting to maintain students’ access to books and to keep their jobs amid cuts to library programs and persistent efforts to restrict reading materials. “Libraries exist to make space for every story and every lived experience,” ALA President Sam Helmick said in a statement. “As we celebrate National Library Week, we reaffirm that libraries are places for knowledge, for access, and for all.”

From Salt Lake City to New York City, parents are demanding more sway over the digital tools that schools give children. Los Angeles parents are fed up with schools loading up students with laptops and tablets, and assigning schoolwork on a slew of apps. Last week, the Los Angeles school board passed a resolution requiring the district to restrict student access to YouTube, eliminate digital devices entirely through first grade and develop screen time limits for higher grades — becoming the first major U.S. school system to do so.

A report sharing the latest trends in student academic growth and achievement focused on the youngest grades: K-2 shows that progress in reading has stalled. While much of the national research has focused on grades 3–8, far less attention has been paid to the early grades. This new report fills that gap, examining how kindergarten through second-grade students weathered the COVID-19 pandemic.

“One of my greatest joys of parenthood was curling up to read before bed,” says Sophie Blackall, the Caldecott-winning illustrator and author of more than 50 picture books, including Hello Lighthouse and If We Were Dogs. Her picture book, If You Come to Earth, is a tender introduction to living on this planet, and her illustrated collection of small joys, Things to Look Forward To, is my go-to gift for friends going through a hard time. “Picture books are for everyone,” agrees Sophie. Here, the author shares 20 favorites, including one she’s given as a gift dozens of times.

DLD is a neurodevelopmental condition that affects how children learn, understand and use language. It impacts vocabulary, grammar and the ability to connect ideas across sentences. It also affects one in 10 children—a prevalence similar to dyslexia. Yet DLD does not have the same level of public awareness. Many educators, clinicians and families are unfamiliar with the term. Instead, children with DLD are often described in other ways. They may be seen as shy, hesitant or inattentive. They may stop mid-sentence, struggle to explain their thinking or have difficulty following multi-step directions. In the classroom, they may look to peers to figure out what to do next. These are signs of difficulty with language.

Researchers have found that children’s selective attention predicts how well they understand texts over time, while some forms of school-related screen reading are linked to weaker comprehension. The finding reframes concerns about reading habits by showing that focus, not format alone, shapes how effectively children make sense of written material.

For years now, graphic novels have been a flourishing market for kids’ books. When you scroll through lists of the most popular middle grade books, graphic novels like The Babysitter’s Club, Dog Man, and Big Nate are always high-ranking, along with comic/novel hybrids like the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. There are many reasons for this, but a big one is that the illustrations provide context, making books less intimidating for new or reluctant readers. And even confident readers enjoy visually immersing themselves in stories. From Boxcar Children to Front Desk, these middle grade classics are being adapted into graphic novels for a new generation of readers.

In 2022, Emily Hanford’s podcast series, Sold a Story, initiated a fresh wave of concern and advocacy, and state and local policies meant to improve reading instruction have proliferated in response. (At least 40 states and counting have enacted science of reading laws.) Whether these efforts ultimately succeed depends in large part on how clearly and consistently they are understood, supported, and enacted by teachers. To learn more about that, we conducted a nationally representative survey of America’s K–3 reading teachers, with the twin goals of assessing their knowledge of reading science and connecting those results to specific and ongoing “SoR” state implementation efforts. Here are the four big findings.

Teachers’ knowledge of the science of reading has improved in recent years, but gaps remain in curriculum adoption and educator training, a Thomas B. Fordham Institute report, released this month, said. A survey developed by Fordham and conducted by Rand Corp. found that only 52% of K-3 teachers say their classroom reading instruction reflects the science of reading approach. About 30% of teachers said they equally favor phonics and cueing — a discredited practice that encourages guessing instead of systematic decoding.

By reading aloud in middle and high school, teachers can expose students to new ideas, genres, and authors—and get them excited about books. For students at St. Marys Area Middle School in St. Marys, Pennsylvania, Fridays are extra-special. Students come in, grab a sketchnote page, and settle in. Teachers read the first chapter of a new book aloud, which usually takes 10–15 minutes, while students doodle, fill in their sketchnotes, and relax.

Improvements in fourth grade reading have not translated into similar gains in eighth grade reading. Early improvements in children’s ability to decode words do not necessarily lead to success with more complex texts that require additional vocabulary and background knowledge. This gap does not negate Mississippi’s progress, but it does raise questions about what the next decade of work needs to look like. Test score changes reflect a combination of policy decisions, classroom practices and broader conditions, often unfolding over many years. Reading is hard to teach, hard to sustain and not connected to any one policy shift.

For 30 years, Bellevue Elementary in Santa Rosa has relied on AmeriCorps services to support their students that need extra help. But when federal funding was cut, and later reinstated, that programming stalled, leaving some students behind. In this episode, principal Nina Craig explains how the loss of tutors affected instruction and student relationships, while new AmeriCorps members, Maya Nurse and Elena Zeoli, describe stepping into classrooms with limited time and resources. We learn how even a few missed months of literacy support reduces how many students can be served.

In recent years, educators say it has been more challenging to get students to pay attention. A growing body of research says that excessive screen time and fast, short-form content like TikTok videos are part of the problem. To cope with and remedy shorter attention spans, educators are employing a list of new and old strategies including brain breaks; limiting screen time; cutting the time students spend on one activity; adding more engaging hands-on projects and meditation.

While a native speaker understands the conversation and is able to say what’s on their mind at any given time, an English learner is processing what is being said, absorbing the information, wondering about words they haven’t heard before, trying to decipher idioms, ensuring that the answer popping up in their head is grammatically correct, and gathering the courage to say it out loud in front of their peers, who might make fun of errors or not understand them. That’s a lot going on! Strategies like extending wait time and having students write before speaking create conditions for English learners to feel confident participating in discussions.

Embedded high-impact tutoring was widely embraced by thousands of school districts as they grappled with learning loss. Two afterschool programs have seen impressive results using data-driven sessions of at least 90 minutes a week, high-quality materials and family engagement.

Balloon — the book — is about a little boy who is in the park with his mom and a beautiful, bright orange balloon. When he walks into a flock of pigeons, they startle him and he accidentally lets go. The balloon flies up, up, up and away. Careful readers will catch a glimpse of the little boy’s balloon later in the story. The last orange illustration, though, is of the boy’s new friend, who he names Balloon. 

Parents are often sent searching for complicated solutions while underestimating the impact of what happens in ordinary moments at home. The best outcomes happen when classrooms and homes work together. The current reading crisis has exposed how much everyday language, attention and early habits have been neglected in shaping literacy, long before a child is ever formally tested. Start with something deceptively simple: conversation. Reading is not just about decoding words on a page; it’s built on language. When parents narrate what they’re doing, ask questions and engage children in back-and-forth talk, they are building vocabulary and comprehension in real time. This isn’t enrichment. It’s the foundation strong readers stand on, and it happens in the car, at the kitchen table and at the checkout line.

The ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego is a giant ed tech gathering where investors, marketers, entrepreneurs and educators do deals and talk, talk, talk about the future of education. For the past two years, the mantra has been, “AI will transform everything.” This year? Not so much. AI products and conversations were still everywhere, but the mood had shifted. There were a lot more questions — about evidence, about screen time backlash from parents, and about overwhelmed teachers. Superintendents were blunt. Their budgets are contracting and the era of “buy and try” is over.

In his chatty, compulsively readable first book for adults, our current national ambassador for young people’s literature, Mac Barnett, champions his career choice and urges our culture to hold kids in higher esteem. “Make Believe” isn’t a history. You’ll find little reference to the many narrative forms that feed into the family tree of what we now call children’s books. But Barnett’s laser focus is the reality of life, and books, for the younger child.

Taking a Master’s in Reading Literacy Education or in Teaching Reading offers significant professional, pedagogical, and financial advantages. This advanced degree not only enhances instructional effectiveness but also opens doors to specialized roles and increased funding opportunities, especially for programs aligned with the Science of Reading. Grounded in decades of cognitive science and educational research, the Science of Reading emphasizes explicit, systematic teaching of foundational skills such as phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. Many states now require or strongly encourage school districts to adopt curricula and professional development aligned with these principles.

Students in Vanessa Malzone’s third grade class at Sheehy Elementary put on their headsets and log into a reading tutoring program a few times a week. They watch videos and read out loud from worksheets into their laptops. On the other side of the screen: college students from across the country, connected by video, hoping to build a connection and confidence in reading. At Sheehy, which, like some other schools, has struggled with third grade reading test scores, school leaders say they’ve seen payoff from the partnership through the Teach for America Ignite Fellowship. The program pairs students with real-time tutors during school hours.

As kidSTREAM prepares to open in Ventura County, it joins a national wave of new children’s museums, expansions of existing institutions and a broadened lineup of programming aimed at young visitors.

[There is] a widespread way of thinking about intervention that if students didn’t learn the material well in class, they might benefit from new ways of approaching it or different explanations of the same concepts. But a new study suggests the opposite was true, that teachers and tutors may have inadvertently confused students by, for example, teaching different letter sounds in different orders or referring to the “magic e” in one setting and the “silent e” in another. The findings are important as school districts look for ways to make tutoring more effective with limited dollars. 

With her most recent announcement that the Treasury Department would take over student loans, Education Secretary Linda McMahon is reversing history and redistributing her department’s major responsibilities across the federal government. K-12 programs are going to the Labor Department, while the Department of Health and Human Services is expected to absorb special education. McMahon dismisses her staff’s oversight functions as unnecessarily burdensome and says parceling out the department’s functions will reduce red tape. But others say those rules ensure that schools spend the money the way Congress intended. 

The author of “A Wolf Called Wander” recommends titles old and new, fantastical and true, that celebrate the natural world. I was lucky enough to grow up in Oregon — with its trees and puddles, lakes and waterfalls, rugged mountains and windswept public beaches. I belonged to a lightly supervised generation and had acres of time to explore the world on and off the page. As a result, my childhood book collection was edge-ruffled by rain and liberally sprinkled with dirt and sand. I was also the lucky recipient of world-class public libraries, which gave me access to a huge range of books, art, maps, field guides and sheet music. I gravitated to the things that celebrated the wilderness whether they were true or fantastical, historical or futuristic. Here are some of my favorites, old and new.

A first-of-its-kind study has found that early intervention services — which can include occupational, physical and speech therapies, among others — improve children’s test scores, even years down the road. The study, conducted jointly by researchers at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and the New York City Health Department, showed that children who received the services between birth and age 3 outperformed similar peers on third grade reading and math tests. Early intervention services are intended for children with disabilities, developmental delays or those who are at risk of them.

While there are many great brain-based learning strategies out there, students may not fully buy into these strategies if they don’t understand why they work. And for many students, no one has ever explained that why. These four hands-on activities guide students to explore how their attention and memory function and how that impacts learning.

A recent study conducted in partnership with Harvard’s EdRedesign Lab evaluates the program’s impact on both short-term outcomes such as test scores, absences, and suspensions, and long-term outcomes including high school graduation, college enrollment, and adult earnings. The findings indicate that CIS programs in Texas have positive academic impacts. When safety-net programs are weakened or fragmented, models like CIS may become even more critical in ensuring that vulnerable students do not fall through the cracks.

A few years ago, Rock Rest Elementary school went all in on phonics. Through collecting student data and watching children read, staff at Rock Rest realized their students still struggled with other literacy skills, like vocabulary and complex sentence structure. So leaders at the school decided to block off time at every grade level each day, a 30-minute period for what Rock Rest would call a “language lab.” There, students would practice using academic vocabulary, explaining their ideas out loud and parsing those of the authors they read—skills that didn’t always receive time in their English/language arts curriculum.

Cynthia and Rosemary: “While we are absolutely delighted with the many awards and starred reviews the books have received, even more critical to us is that Heartdrum has had a ripple effect on the children’s publishing industry. Other publishers have seen the success of Heartdrum and have been encouraged by that to publish Indigenous authors. This is a sea-change from how things had been for years, and we’re happy about the small part we have played in this improvement.”

Mississippi has seen a stunning turnaround in national test scores in the past decade, even as they have fallen almost everywhere else. Sarah Mervosh, an education reporter, explains what the state can teach the rest of the country about how to educate students.

Other states are now trying to emulate what Mississippi did. Those efforts largely revolve around adopting what’s known as the “science of reading”— a set of principles and teaching techniques, including phonics, that are grounded in decades of empirical research. But what many outsiders fail to understand is that Mississippi changed far more than just how reading is taught. They therefore miss why and how our literacy approach succeeded. A phonics-based curriculum is only one part of how Mississippi went from worst to first in education. The other part is much harder to pull off. 

A federally funded pilot program aimed at helping students improve their reading skills has proven to be a huge success in Washington, D.C. The program targeted primarily low-income and African American students who traditionally had the lowest test scores in reading — and significant improvements were seen at all grade levels. Antoinette Mitchell, D.C.’s state superintendent of education, is thrilled with the results. “The kids did so well that they actually shrunk a third of the achievement gap that exists in our schools today between those students who participated in this grant and those that did not.”

A meta-analysis published in the Review of Educational Research and taking into account the results of 46 studies conducted between 1955 and 2020, researcher Virginia Clinton-Lisell found that levels of understanding do not differ significantly when the same texts are read or listened to. However, the meta-analysis also highlights that understanding is more improved in reading than in listening when participants can read at their own pace. Reading proves especially more effective than listening when evaluating general and inferential comprehension, which is not the case for literal comprehension.

Each year, more than 600,000 aspiring teachers are enrolled in educator-preparation programs across the country. Another 600,000 college students are employed through Federal Work-Study as well as state programs, such as Californians for All College Corps. We can, and must, activate these people as tutors for the students who need them most. To do that, policymakers should act on two fronts.

Three ELL educators weigh in. “Ultimately, I believe the science of reading offers valuable guidance, but it must be implemented in ways that are linguistically inclusive and culturally affirming. It’s not just about how students learn to read, but how we honor who they are as readers, learners, and language users. For multilingual students, literacy development is a dynamic and multilingual process, and our instructional approaches must reflect and respect that complexity.”

Meriden is Connecticut’s lowest funded school district — and seven of its eight elementary schools are beating the odds in literacy scores. An almost decade-long overhaul of the district has been a systematic transformation – rooted in consistency across classrooms and campuses, accountability, hands-on oversight, relationship and trust.

According to the National Literacy Institute, more than 50 percent of adults in America read at lower than a sixth grade reading level. Children’s literacy seems even more dire, with the lowest scores being recorded in standardized tests in reading for fourth and eighth graders since 1992.But I am still hopeful. And I believe verse novels can be key in unlocking a love of reading. Verse novels offer so much in terms of creating excitement in young readers—beginning with a lower word count. Kids just do not have the attention span of the past, and I am a firm believer that we must meet kids where they are now.

When students record themselves reading aloud using an app—and then listen back to reflect on their own pacing and expression—their fluency improves over time.

Most kindergartners today attend school for a full day. And the focus of most kindergarten classes has shifted from play and exploration to reading readiness. In her new book, American Kindergarten: Dispatches from the First Year of School, developmental psychologist Susan Engel shared features common to all kindergarten classrooms and unveiled some stark distinctions and surprises. Her observations lend eye-opening insights into how kindergarten shapes the educational trajectory of today’s K-12 students.

The tide has turned on reading instruction. Nearly all states have passed “science of reading” laws, and most researchers and educators now agree students need to learn letters and sounds explicitly and systematically to become proficient readers. And yet a look inside K–3 classrooms reveals surprising variation in exactly how these letters and sounds are taught. Along with the many research-based methods in use, there’s another practice taking hold, and at great cost to students: over-teaching. Mark Seidenberg, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who studies reading science, helped persuade the public of the need for science-based instruction—and now he’s among those sounding the alarm on over-instruction. Reading teachers need not aim to teach every single pattern students will encounter in text, he says; they simply need to teach enough that students can achieve “escape velocity,” or the ability to start cracking the code on their own.

Research by library consultant Keith Curry Lance has shown for decades that schools with librarians on campus have better test scores, on average, than schools without trained library staff. Not only that, but schools with a full-time librarian perform better than schools with only part-time library staff. Librarians can help improve student reading scores by co-teaching literacy skills and incentivizing reading for fun. “(Librarians) can co-teach with language arts teachers. They can help design lessons and inquiry-based projects that will help those students hit the standards, like reading for information.”

A thoughtfully designed classroom—and lesson—should always take into account the known limits of the student brain, says developmental psychologist Karrie Godwin. Educators can make relatively simple adjustments to achieve better outcomes.

This year marks the centennial anniversary of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), arguably the premier professional organization for the early care and education workforce in America. NAEYC’s centennial presents an opportunity for longtime early childhood educators and leaders to recognize the progress the field has made, and to consider why, 100 years later, some systemic issues remain unchanged. 

At the recent inaugural National Committee for Effective Literacy (NCEL) Summit, the closing panel—former secretary of education Miguel Cardona, Dr. Nell Duke, Amelia Larson, and Jody Slavick—offered a clear message: multilingual learners must be centered in the nation’s literacy systems, not treated as an add-on.

It’s easy to get swept up in the hype about artificial intelligence tutors. But the evidence so far suggests caution. Even when AI tutors are designed not to give away answers, they haven’t consistently produced better results than learning the old-fashioned way without AI. Still, researchers who have produced these skeptical studies haven’t given up hope. Some are still experimenting, trying to build better AI tutors and gave made progress with an older ed tech idea: personalized practice.
 

The Reading Reimagined program funds teams of researchers to study how to support struggling readers in grades 3-8. In 2024, it published research with the testing organization ETS that confirmed the idea of a “decoding threshold”—a mastery of sounding of words that students needed to achieve in order to continue making progress in reading in upper elementary school and beyond. But that threshold isn’t static—the decoding skills that students need grow and change as kids start to read more complex texts, Kockler and her colleagues argue in a new report from AERDF. The report makes the case that all students could benefit from instruction that helps them decode multisyllabic words, the longer, more complicated words that often bear much of a text’s meaning in upper grades’ classrooms. This instruction is so central to reading comprehension, the report argues, that states should include advanced foundational literacy skills in their academic standards for grades 3-8.

Passing dyslexia legislation is not the finish line. It is the starting point. Without intentional systems, sustained teacher training, and clear accountability developed in partnership with educators and families, these laws will not reach classrooms in meaningful ways. Policy alone does not change outcomes. If dyslexia legislation is going to truly improve students’ reading results, leaders must act by training every teacher in Structured Literacy, building accountability systems that measure impact rather than compliance, and creating authentic opportunities to listen to and partner with parents. Our students cannot afford a delay. The laws are in place. Now it’s time to make them real.

While teacher professional development is linked with higher student test scores, identifying which elements of training lead to those positive outcomes is still a mixed bag, according to a report released last week by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Out of five meta-analyses that measured the effectiveness of teacher professional development reviewed by the GAO, researchers found the following elements of PD were each positively correlated in at least one study with student outcomes: coaching, collaboration, a focus on how to use curriculum materials, and pedagogical content knowledge. 

At this year’s American Library Association’s Youth Media Awards there was a new inaugural award announced: The Outstanding Comics Award. Divided into three divisions (Adult, YA, and Children’s) and then, from there, into three categories (Fiction, Nonfiction, and Series) this is the first official award to acknowledge the contributions of comics and comic/graphic novel creators by the ALA. But how much does the average library joe know about this award? With that thought in mind, I decided to go straight to the top. And the top, in this particular case, is none other than Jennie Law, Chair of the American Library Association’s (ALA) Graphic Novels and Comics Round Table (GNCRT) Outstanding Comics Award for Children committee. 

The country is in the midst of an extraordinary literacy crisis. Today, 70% of kids who are graduating aren’t reading proficiently. Let that sink in for a moment. This isn’t a small group of kids; it’s the majority. Experts have raised a variety of factors contributing to this reality: learning loss due to the pandemic, increased screen time, the dissolution of long-form reading and teacher burnout. While each of these points are critical, there’s an even deeper, more fundamental issue facing students that a flurry of educational reforms haven’t fixed and may have worsened: They are simply not spending enough time actually reading in school.

We can welcome multilinguals into our classrooms through translanguaging. In translanguaging, students use both English and their home language to make meaning of content. They are not doing the work in each language (meaning doing the work twice), but using two or more languages to do the work. The teacher doesn’t need to know or be able to assess the student’s home language—the goal is for students to use their home language as a tool to acquire the academic and content vocabulary they need to express themselves clearly in English.

In June 2025, Jason Reynolds released Soundtrack, an audio-book original that went on to win an Odyssey Award Honor. In April 2026, Soundtrack will become available in a printed format. The man of many talents sat down with SLJ to talk about taking an audio-only story to a print version, advice for young people who are interested in poetry, and a wish for more whimsy in picture books.