Today’s Literacy Headlines

The part of writing that feels hardest for both adults and students is generating ideas. Sitting in front of a blank page can feel daunting when you don’t yet have a reliable way to begin. To sustain a writing life, teachers need a reliable way to generate ideas before they ever sit down to draft. Beginning with ideas inspired by reading, listening, and noticing creates momentum, reduces the pressure of the blank page, and gives teachers a process they can later model explicitly for students.

School leaders are using supportive and empathetic approaches to help families of young children make attendance a priority. Elementary school principals are in a unique position to set good attendance habits for young students and their families as they enter the K-12 system, said Hedy Chang, CEO, president and founder of the nonprofit Attendance Works. Chronic absence as early as pre-K can negatively impact reading proficiency by 3rd grade, achievement levels in middle school, and suspension and drop out rates in high school, Chang said. There also are impacts on chronically absent students’ executive functioning skills and social-emotional growth. “This has to do with the whole child’s development,” Chang said.

The United States Board on Books for Young People (USBBY) announced its 2026 Outstanding International Books list, featuring 41 exceptional titles for children and young adults published in 2025 and originating from 24 countries. Since 2006, USBBY’s annual lists have introduced young readers in the U.S. to global perspectives, outstanding international creators, and stories that foster empathy, bridge cultures, and build connections. Together, these books show young people around the world seeking connection and belonging—through family, friendship, self-discovery, and engagement with their communities. 

They learned to babble to masked adults. They spent their toddler years on video calls with grandparents instead of at storytime in the local library. Many started preschool only to have it disrupted by quarantines or staffing shortages. Now, the first generation of children born during the COVID pandemic has entered kindergarten, and educators say they are meeting a cohort unlike any before. Nearly three-quarters of the educators we surveyed said today’s kindergarteners are behind in early literacy skills compared with students five years ago. Equally striking were findings around attention and confidence. 

World Read-Aloud Day brings classrooms, families, libraries, and communities together through the power of shared stories. A single voice and a meaningful book can shape students’ identities, nurture empathy, and ignite a passion for literacy that lasts a lifetime. Reading aloud does much more than build decoding, fluency, or oral language and listening skills—it creates a communal learning space where every reader belongs. Here are ideas on how to get started with read alouds, including examples of videos that feature authors or organizations reading books aloud.

Happy Black History Month! As you and the young readers in your life pick out this month’s nonfiction books, consider works that highlight Black inventors and scientists throughout history. From George Washington Carver, whose agricultural science work taught farmers how to avoid soil depletion, to Harold Amos, a pioneer in microbiology, to Lonnie Johnson, the inventor of the Super Soaker, there are many Black inventors and scientists for young readers to learn about.

World Read Aloud Day is the perfect time to think about how to expand our school celebrations of highly effective, engaging read-alouds to reach our students at home. Read-alouds, paired with effective interactive strategies, are an easy and effective way to support early comprehension, vocabulary, and a love of reading at home. Here are 10 research-based read-aloud strategies and how to share them with families.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, in her final budget proposal this week, is set to unveil a budget proposal for funding schools that invests $625 million in programs aimed at addressing the state’s K-12 literacy crisis. The literacy investment would come at a time of increased focus on the troubling performance of Michigan students in literacy in the early grades. Just 38.9% of third graders were proficient on the English language arts portion of the Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress last year. It was the lowest performance of third graders in the exam’s 11-year history. On the national front, just 24% of Michigan fourth graders were proficient in 2024 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

A ray of hope is emerging in American education. Not among Democrats or Republicans, each diverted by culture wars. Not in the education reform movement, largely abandoned by the philanthropists who once propelled it. Not in most schools across the country, still struggling with chronic absenteeism and a decade of faltering test scores. Rather, hope emerges in the most unlikely of places: three states here in the Deep South that long represented America’s educational basement. These states — Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi — have histories of child poverty, racism and dismal educational outcomes, and they continue to spend less than most other states on public schools. Perhaps the most important [lesson learned] is an insistence on metrics, accountability and mastery of reading by the end of third grade. And while reading gets the attention, just as important is getting kids to attend school regularly.

Over the last four years, I’ve partnered with preservice teachers and local schools to transform nearby trails, campus green spaces, and community sites into standards-aligned STEM learning environments for elementary school students. The outdoors supports inclusive, multimodal instruction by offering visual, kinesthetic, auditory, and social entry points, all of which make STEM learning more accessible and meaningful. During outdoor learning, students work in small groups to collect data, test ideas, and make sense of real-world phenomena. Literacy integration emerges organically; students read informational texts before visits, then record field notes, discuss observations, and construct evidence-based explanations.

We Need Diverse Books announced the 2026 Walter Dean Myers Awards. The Walter Awards are given in two categories: Younger Readers (ages 9-13) and Teen (ages 13-18). And the 2026 winners are: Younger Readers Winner: The Incredibly Human Henson Blayze by Derrick Barnes; Honor Title: All the Blues in the Sky by Renée Watson. Teen Winner: Champion by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Raymond Obstfeld, and Ed Laroche; Honor Title: King of the Neuro Verse by Idris Goodwin. The 2026 Walter Awards ceremony will be held on Monday, March 23, at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, D.C.

Science of reading reforms have boosted decoding, but they were built for monolingual, culturally narrow classrooms. Many science of reading curricula lack multilingual learners’ home languages and cultural knowledge, making it harder for them to comprehend texts. Decodable texts deepen this gap because they are designed to practice phonics rather than to develop rich vocabulary, complex language or connections to texts. As a result, students may look strong on decoding data while continuing to lag in comprehension, confirming NAEP’s widening comprehension gaps even with decoding gains. Despite these challenges, teachers have powerful tools at their disposal that do not require abandoning foundational skills. Instead, they ask us to expand our definition of literacy beyond decoding and provide instructional time for students to develop language comprehension.

“Smile,” “Sisters” and “Guts” still feel fresh as daisies and are currently the most circulated graphic novels in my school library by a mile. … If you have Raina-obsessed readers in your life who have read the “Smile” books, as well as her two stand-alone graphic novels, “Drama” and “Ghosts,” here are 13 other recommendations.

For years, the screen time recommendation for children under age 2 has been simple: They shouldn’t have any. But as surveys of parents have revealed that young children are increasingly exposed to digital media, it’s become clear there’s a disconnect: Families aren’t following the guidance. Not only do the youngest children in the U.S. have some exposure to screens, many of them are getting screen time daily  — and for an average of about an hour each day. 

It is very, very important that kids learn the skill of sounding things out, of converting letters on the page into spoken words. But it’s also critical that in the early elementary years, we are growing their vocabulary, growing their general knowledge of the world, and growing their familiarity with books and stories. When they read something, they should have good odds of being familiar with most of the words in it and have enough background on the world to figure out the rest. Even in states that have logged huge improvements in reading — like Mississippi — the latter is often missing.

Dyslexia is the most common learning disability affecting children, but what does the research actually tell us about how to identify and support students with dyslexia in practice? In this episode, Assistant Professor Phil Capin moderated a discussion with leading scholars Professor Nadine Gaab and Tim Odegard of Middle Tennessee State University, exploring how the science of reading can inform effective supports for students with dyslexia across grades and contexts.

The budget funds the Education Department at $79 billion through Sept. 30. That’s about $217 million above FY 2025 levels. The funding plan does not stop Education Department moves to transfer statutorily required program responsibilities to other federal agencies, but it directs the agencies involved to provide Congress with biweekly reports on the implementation of any interagency agreements. Additionally, the bill requires on-time formula grant funding available to states and districts at levels dictated by Congress in the funding bill. And it adds a new requirement to maintain the Education Department staff at levels necessary to fulfill its statutory responsibilities, including carrying out programs and activities funded in the bill. 

Mike Schmoker is a veteran educator who’s long been a go-to source for “practical, nuts-and-bolts advice, wisdom, and insight” on school improvement. In his book Results Now 2.0: The Untapped Opportunities for Swift, Dramatic Gains in Achievement, Schmoker calls out the “massive gap” between proven practice and common practice. He argues that schools can make immediate, measurable academic gains by leaning on proven curricular and instructional practices such as short cycles of teaching, checking for understanding, and reteaching throughout the lesson. Given the recent surge of interest in high-quality instructional materials and the science of reading, I thought it a good time to hear Schmoker’s take. Here’s what he had to say.

On February 4, 2026, readers of all ages join together to celebrate World Read Aloud Day, also called WRAD. The yearly event encourages people to read out loud together and celebrate the power of stories. WRAD takes place on the first Wednesday of February and reaches readers in more than 170 countries. WRAD began in 2010, with a goal to bring attention to the importance of reading aloud. Today, schools host read-aloud events, families read together at home, and authors join in online by participating in interactive read alouds through Scholastic’s Storyvoice platform. Last year, WRAD reached 391 million people worldwide. I interviewed Pam Allyn, Executive Director of LitWorld and the creator of WRAD, to learn more.

Reading aloud to children is a staple of elementary school classrooms, and for good reason. Read-alouds are helpful for vocabulary development, fluency building, and comprehension. To amplify the read-aloud experience, many teachers employ interactive strategies that go beyond speaking and listening. They ask students to identify character traits or make predictions based on context clues and inferences. As a kindergarten teacher myself, I’m a proponent of interactive read-alouds. I recently tried taking them a step further with an immersive read-aloud—a fun and unique exercise where students enthusiastically participate in the story as it unfolds, which allows for more access points and differentiated autonomy.

Summer reading can be more than recording reading times to collect prizes at the local library branch or a few mandated titles from a high school English class. The Collaborative Summer Reading Program creates resources and programming for public libraries around a new theme each year. (This year is Unearth a Story: Desentierra una Historia—Dinosaurs/Archaeology/Paleontology.) But across the country, school and public librarians are creating their own summer reading programs that not only combat the academic slide and keep kids reading but promote book choice, personal connection, and even outdoor activities.

Over the next several weeks, more than 500,000 students across the country will take an updated version of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in math and reading, but more improvements may be on the way. With its decades-long trendlines, cross-state comparisons, and scientific rigor, NAEP, also known as The Nation’s Report Card, is widely considered the gold standard in assessments. NAEP is complex and hard to change, even when that change is a sign of progress. For example, the updated math and reading tests that today’s fourth and eighth graders are now taking are based on new frameworks that we started developing in 2018, before those fourth graders entered preschool. The rock solid systems underpinning NAEP have helped it earn its strong reputation. But there are several imperatives for NAEP to meet in the years ahead for it to maintain its status.

Kadir Nelson’s book “BASKET BALL: The Story of the All-American Game” is a long-awaited follow-up to “We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball,” published in 2008. Its tone is warm and informal, its conversational style crafted to convey the sense of an older, avuncular figure — a once-upon-a-time player — speaking directly to its target audience of 8- to 12-year-olds. Its easy grace seems to have been honed by family basketball culture — “I was about 4 years old, and my uncle handed me a ball from a game he’d just played” — and by artistic aspirations that carried the high school shooter east from Los Angeles to the Pratt School of Art in Brooklyn, where there were, still, plenty of opportunities for pickup games.

A review of nearly 100 studies found that by age 8, students believed that girls were better at verbal skills, and that this affected boys’ confidence and interest in reading later on. Perhaps because of these influences, girls are more likely to say they like to read — so they do it more and get better at it. Also highly correlated are the kinds of classroom behaviors that lead to learning — things like attentiveness, working independently and sitting still. These are skills that girls tend to develop earlier than boys — and as schools have begun expecting children to learn to read earlier, boys could be at a disadvantage. Boys’ reading struggles are not inevitable, research suggests, and addressing the deficit could improve outcomes in school and beyond. Researchers suggested some strategies that could help boys — and any struggling readers: intervene early; teach in small groups; teach reading well; make it enjoyable; and model reading. 

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires that students with disabilities have access to assistive technology, which can include everything from pencil grips and modified scissors to swivel chairs, large mobile touch screens and eye-controlled communication devices. However, in a report out this week, the U.S. Government Accountability Office finds that educators face many barriers to following through on this mandate. School staff reported to government investigators that they know little about assistive technology. Teachers often think of high-tech devices, but not simple tools and, with technology continually evolving, school officials said they have trouble staying on top of the latest options, according to the report.

In the children’s book The One About the Blackbird, a young boy learns to play guitar from his grandfather. And there’s one song in particular they love. That song is, of course, “Blackbird,” by The Beatles. The author Melanie Florence says she wrote the book as an intergenerational love story. “It’s about the connection between a boy and his grandfather and their shared love of music,” she explains. After the grandfather teaches the little boy the guitar, the little boy grows up to become a musician.

Four school districts in major urban areas using the science of reading found while students are grasping basic literacy skills, limitations toward deeper comprehension still exist, according to a new study. The “Robust Reading Comprehension” report, conducted by nonprofit research organization SRI, examined literacy instruction in districts in Texas, Maryland, North Carolina and Virginia that have been using materials rooted in the popular phonics-based literacy approach for at least five years. Researchers found a majority of reading lessons lacked “depth” – meaning foundational skills were mainly limited to working on single words rather than reading them in sentences. 

When play and academics are intentionally balanced, everyone benefits. Students experience literacy instruction that’s interactive and engaging without losing sight of foundational skills. Play and academics need not compete for time or priority. When planned with intention, they strengthen one another. The hum of conversation, movement, joy, and deep engagement in my classroom aren’t the result of a perfect schedule. Rather, they’re the result of thoughtful planning and a belief that play belongs in serious learning.

Teresa Rivas provides guidance counseling at Owen Goodnight Middle School in San Marcos, Texas. She talks with students about their goals and helps if they’re struggling in class. She’s also a trained navigator placed there by a nonprofit called Communities in Schools. The idea behind CIS and other “community school” programs is that students can’t succeed academically if they’re struggling at home. A new study demonstrates that such efforts have long-term effects. Although contemporary education policy has focused intently on standardized tests, student and teacher tracking, and other accountability measures, the CIS study suggests that the United States could bolster achievement by providing more social support too. 

Renée Watson’s “All the Blues in the Sky,” in which the Oregon author blends poetry and prose to tell the story of a teen confronting the death of her best friend, has won the John Newbery Medal for the year’s best children’s book. “All the Blues in the Sky” is set in Harlem, New York, but much of Watson’s work draws from her experiences growing up in Northeast Portland. Watson called the Ryan Hart series for middle readers “my love letter to Portland.”

As the pace of product development for AI-powered toys accelerates, controversy — and warnings — about the appropriateness of these products for young children have left many parents and educators tempted to tune out or opt out. But as kids interact with AI more regularly, some experts say it’s important to teach kids what’s actually behind AI and how to use it responsibly. A new curriculum focused on computer science and artificial intelligence aims to teach young kids to build, program and prototype together. In essence, students build their own machine learning models, solving problems, inventing characters and telling stories connected to their interests. 

Vocabulary studies are essential for building students’ confidence in reading, writing, and speaking. Traditional activities often rely on drill and memorization, which can lead to low engagement. This year, in my grade four Dual Language classroom, I introduced an innovative approach by encouraging students to create their own board games to learn new vocabulary and Hanzi (Chinese characters). This approach makes learning in their primary language fun for students and also provides significant benefits for teaching, learning, and assessing vocabulary.

By guiding students through developing their own understanding of core concepts, teachers ensure that the whole class is starting on a strong foundation. In Frederick, Maryland, third-grade teacher Karen Wills is beginning a lesson on finding claims in a text with her class at Sugarloaf Elementary School. “Yesterday we read the text Edison’s Best Invention, and then today they had to identify the claim within that text,” she explains. “But I knew that prior to them identifying a claim, we really needed to see what they knew about a claim.” So Wills planned an activity to help her students tap into their prior knowledge.

An upcoming episode of a popular PBS Kids show will be told from the viewpoint of a character with autism. “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood” will premiere an episode this week with a story from Max, a recurring character on the show, which is a spin-off of the venerable “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” In the episode, Max, who has autism, learns that people can be more than one thing by finding out the Mr. McFeely, the mail carrier, is also a volunteer story-time reader at the library.

Snow is a joy we can’t buy, an event we can’t control, the closest thing we have to magic during its brief time on earth. No wonder kids love to hear stories about it. Like snowflakes themselves, no two picture books about snow are the same. But they share some common ground — dramatic shadows, deep footprints, animal tracks, wonder on faces of all ages — and land their share of Caldecotts.

Originating in 1922 with the creation of the John Newbery Medal, the American Library Association (ALA) annually honors notable books, videos and other media aimed at children and teens. through their ALA Youth Media Awards. The complete list of 2026 winners can be found here.

Last year, we set out to find the schools that were doing much better at teaching third graders to read than their poverty levels might predict. After looking at data for nearly 42,000 schools, we identified 2,158 that we called Bright Spots. While these schools didn’t always have the highest absolute scores, their students performed much better than might be expected, based on their poverty rates. Today, we’re calling out 255 of those Bright Spots — five public schools in every state and Washington, D.C., that are beating the odds for their kids by the biggest margins.

Many states are focusing on deploying research-backed reading programs for their younger students. But despite a stagnant reading comprehension rate for older students, they are continually left out of the conversation about improving literacy. “There’s this focus on K-3 without a lot of resources dedicated to helping the kids in secondary school that fell through the cracks,” says Anna Shapiro, associate policy researcher for the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit public policy research firm. “Starting early makes a lot of sense in a lot of ways, but there’s also all these kids in the school system that didn’t benefit from that and do need intervention as well.”

A study published in Scientific Reports challenges longtime notions about how deaf children learn to read. Vanderbilt Health researchers report that many prelingually deaf children who use cochlear implants (CIs) achieve age-typical language and reading comprehension, even though their ability to process speech sounds is reduced. The findings present a paradox: In hearing children, comparable deficits in phonological processing, or the ability to discriminate and manipulate speech sounds, are associated with severe reading disorders. In this study, deaf children with CIs often read successfully, suggesting they may rely on alternative cognitive and neural pathways for literacy.

This article tells the story of Center City Congress Heights and D.C. Prep Anacostia, two of the city’s high-poverty schools showing that significant and sustained attendance improvement is possible. Students in pre-K through eighth grade at both schools saw chronic absenteeism rates double after the return to in-person schooling during the pandemic. Now their rates are at the lowest levels of any school east of the Anacostia River in D.C.’s most impoverished communities of Ward 8, where half of the students are chronically absent

Difficulties or delays with fine motor skills can impact a child from the moment they wake up until the moment they go to sleep. In the classroom, many of the most common tasks and activities present challenges for children with graphomotor (handwriting) and fine motor difficulties. But there are many ways to address both by implementing whole class strategies based in Universal Design for Learning.

In just three years, artificial intelligence has revolutionized entertainment, finance, manufacturing and many other industries. But a new report from the Brookings Institution concludes that when it comes to education, the risks of AI overshadow its benefits. Researchers interviewed K-12 students, parents and teachers in 50 countries. Their conclusion: AI undermines young people’s foundational development in a way that simply can’t be offset by its productivity advantages.

As educators and school leaders, we now face urgent questions around misinformation, academic integrity, and critical thinking. The issue is no longer just whether students can use AI tools, but whether they can interpret, evaluate, and question what they see. This is where visual literacy becomes a frontline defence. Teaching students to read images critically, to see them as constructed texts rather than neutral data, strengthens the same skills we rely on for strong reading comprehension: inference, evidence-based reasoning, and metacognitive awareness.

To a kid, funny books feel like contraband. Somehow, adults you’ve never met have felt the things you’ve been turning over in your head but have never quite had the vocabulary to express. They get you. I remember when, as a kid, I got my hands on the good stuff, by Judy Blume, Shel Silverstein, Gary Larson — truth-tellers and joyful provocateurs. There’s something a little punk rock about all of them. Here are a handful of books that have helped shape my sense of humor — and continue to make me laugh.

Education leaders have miles to go before they sleep when it comes to SOR implementation. For states newer to SOR work, “Mississippi Marathon” leader Kymyona Burk cautions against attempts to “plug and play” from another state. Although states can certainly learn from one another, Burk emphasizes the need for each state to examine its own student and teacher data to identify “breakdowns” in understanding and implementation. From there, state leaders can tailor policies to meet the needs of their unique populations.

Prosody, or the pitch, phrasing, and pace of reading expression, is the magic that makes words come alive. According to the article “The Science of Reading Comprehension Instruction,” prosody is a key component of oral reading fluency that can have direct positive outcomes for reading comprehension as well. To connect all components, while tackling the challenges of time, student engagement, and cost, many of our teachers shifted to digital tools to capture student fluency. Here are three options our teachers explored this year.

Students who don’t acquire foundational reading skills early often face steep learning challenges as they progress through school. Effective interventions targeted at older students include screening to identify areas of struggle, a curriculum that aligns with the science of reading and includes texts that are both engaging and grade-appropriate, foundational reading instruction, and ongoing professional development.

In a groundbreaking study that sheds light on the educational techniques applied to students with Autism, researchers Wang and Poon have evaluated the effectiveness of a multiple strategies approach designed to enhance social inferential reading comprehension among elementary students diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The researchers implemented a tailored educational program focusing on various strategies that combined direct instruction, interactive tasks, and socio-emotional learning activities. This multi-layered approach was hypothesized to not only enhance reading comprehension but also foster social understanding—a vital component of effective learning and communication for these students.

Finding family engagement strategies that feel authentic and manageable can help elementary teachers establish and maintain close relationships with parents. Strategies can include positive phone calls home, photos of students learning, Friday communication, parent surveys, and personal notes. 

The risks of using generative artificial intelligence to educate children and teens currently overshadow the benefits, according to a new study by the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education. The sweeping study includes focus groups and interviews with K-12 students, parents, educators and tech experts in 50 countries, as well as a literature review of hundreds of research articles. It found that using AI in education can “undermine children’s foundational development” and that “the damages it has already caused are daunting,” though “fixable.” Here are some of the pros and cons that the report lays out, along with a sampling of the study’s recommendations for teachers, parents, school leaders and government officials: Pro: AI can help students learn to read and write; Con: AI poses a grave threat to students’ cognitive development.

Elementary school librarian Tom Bober has been thinking about America’s 250th birthday for a few years. He wondered what the semiquincentennial will mean to his students beyond fireworks and flags. And how can he and his library at Captain Elementary in St. Louis, MO, make it more than the summer celebrations? How can he share the story of the United States? The answer: Picture books and primary sources. “My kids connect with stories, and we have great authors [whose] writing can help shape their understanding of what these 250 years have been beyond the patriotic music and the flags,” says Bober

This week’s Teacher Feature takes us to Candler County, inside Metter Elementary, where Ulmer teaches third-grade reading. The moment you step through her door, you can tell you’re not in an ordinary classroom. The walls, the details, the atmosphere—everything feels like Hogwarts. And it’s not subtle. “She really likes Harry Potter,” the student who nominated Ulmer, Hayzel Johnson says with a laugh. Ulmer doesn’t deny it. She embraces it—right down to the class pet: a bearded dragon named Norbert. But the theme isn’t there just for decoration. For Ulmer, Harry Potter is personal. It’s the story that made her a reader, and she wants her students to know that reading can change for them, too.

Use ‘semantic gradients’ to turn vocabulary study into a shared thinking activity that explores the subtle differences between related words. When Joshua LaFleur prepares his second and third graders to read a science text about the Voyager 2 probe, he doesn’t pre-teach key vocabulary words with a list. Instead, LaFleur, a doctoral candidate at Western University, gets students into small groups and has them investigate their prior knowledge about deep space travel by arranging key words along a continuum on a whiteboard—from lonely to isolated—prompting students to debate and tease out the “semantic gradients,” or subtle differences in meaning, between the terms.  

Pioneered by Edward Steichen, Lewis W. Hine and Tana Hoban, photographically illustrated “concept” books have never had a more potentially receptive audience. In recent decades, the ranks of photographers making occasional forays or full-time careers as picture book artists have swelled, while the uses to which they apply the medium have become more varied. For “How Are You Peeling? Foods With Moods,” a concept book about human emotions, Saxton Freymann photographed oranges, apples, tomatoes, onions and peppers, all carved like mini jack-o’-lanterns with uncannily lifelike expressions. Other photographers — Susan Kuklin, Ken Robbins, Shelley Rotner and George Ancona, to name a few — have embraced the picture book as an outlet for the kind of humanistic photo essay once routinely showcased in magazines like Look and Life. Still others employ digital tools such as Photoshop or, as William Wegman did for his deadpan mash-ups of classic tales featuring an all-Weimaraner cast, conjure photo-theater magic via the old-fashioned method of staging scenes for the camera — to produce images that, alluringly, manage to look real and unreal in equal measure.

Mississippi’s progress has made it the envy of the education world, inspiring countless think pieces and recurring debates about whether the “Mississippi miracle” could be real. It did not do so by relying on some of the most common proposals held up as solutions in education, like reducing class sizes, or dramatically boosting per-student funding. Rather, the state pushed through a vast list of other changes from the top down, including changing the way reading is taught, in an approach known as the science of reading, but also embracing contentious school accountability policies other states have backed away from. Mississippi also measures how much students progress toward proficiency. Schools get credit if students show improvement — and double credit for the improvement of students in the bottom 25 percent. The state also takes an unusually strong role in telling schools what to do.

There is perhaps nothing more important right now than knowing how to separate fact from falsehood, to spot and stop misinformation and manipulation. Adults struggle with these media and news literacy skills and kids must be taught, a job that is often the responsibility of library media specialists. Teaching news and media literacy was once about helping students confirm facts. With the introduction and proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI), the skills are as much about determining what is real as what is true. And educators must not only manage the breadth of sources of information and the advancements of technology but also pierce a growing distrust.

Adopting a truly knowledge-building elementary curriculum—one that is rich in content, including topics in social studies and science—is crucial for improving students’ education outcomes. But no matter how well-constructed a curriculum is, it’s possible for districts and schools to implement it in a way that doesn’t work well. And that happens surprisingly often. A new study from SRI analyzed reading instruction in four large districts that had been using effective knowledge-building curricula for several years, long enough to figure out how to implement a curriculum well. And yet the researchers found that most reading comprehension instruction—about two-thirds of the lessons observed—supported “surface-level” rather than “robust” understanding.

Philadelphia will open two new schools as part of the new North Philadelphia Promise Zone, which is meant to boost student achievement and provide additional support to families in one of the city’s poorest areas, Superintendent Tony Watlington said. The program will be modeled on the Harlem Children’s Zone, a high-profile education program launched in New York City in the 1990s. The Harlem Children’s Zone organization provides charter schools and social services to families in one of New York City’s poorest neighborhoods. Researchers found it helped boost student achievement and shrunk the gap between Black and white children’ achievement. However, some experts have warned that efforts to replicate the program elsewhere have had mixed results.

If 2025 featured a mix of highs and lows in early care and education, 2026 is poised to bring a series of deeper challenges to the field, as states prepare to make difficult budget decisions in anticipation of the looming federal funding cuts. From immigration enforcement to universal child care, policy experts preview what to expect in early care and education in the year ahead.

“I’m writing for the kid I used to be,” says Dav Pilkey, who defied expectations to create three blockbuster graphic-novel series. Pilkey’s line drawings, purposeful misspellings and unplugged humor are what made him a mainstay on the best-seller list. He launched his first graphic novel series in 1997 with “The Adventures of Captain Underpants,” which has now been translated into 37 languages. Dog Man, which started in 2016, has been translated into 50 languages. It spawned a spinoff, “Cat Kid Comic Club” (28 languages), and a movie, as did Captain Underpants. Dog Man and Cat Kid both have their own musicals. “Dav introduced a new genre 20 years before the explosion of graphic novels,” said Deb Pettid, co-founder of The Rabbit Hole, a museum of children’s literature in North Kansas City, Mo., which features a Pilkey-inspired Turbo Toilet 2000 in its main restroom. “For a lot of kids, Dav’s books might be the first ones they read cover to cover, and that’s a huge accomplishment.”