Today’s Literacy Headlines

The district as a whole has been making impressive gains in reading and math over the last few years. In 2025, it reported its highest-ever performance on California’s state test. Moreover, those gains were broadly shared across the district’s most challenging, high-poverty schools. LAUSD had a disproportionately large share of what we identified as the state’s “bright spot” schools. L.A. accounted for 8% of all California schools in our sample but 16% of those that are the most exceptional. All told, we found 45 L.A. district schools that were beating the odds and helping low-income students read proficiently. Some of these were selective magnet schools, but many were not. 

We spend a lot of time on Heavy Medal thinking about the Newbery Terms and Criteria. We most often focus on the “literary qualities” that are named in the Criteria. Also known as “the big 6”:  Theme, Information, Plot, Characters, Setting, and Style. Very important stuff in a literary award…but not the only stuff when it comes to the Newbery. “Committee members must consider excellence of presentation for a child audience.” Does that mean that is one of the criteria too? What does “excellence of presentation for a child audience” mean? And why does that get overlooked so much?

As school districts push to lower absenteeism rates, the software company SchoolStatus, which helps schools keep track of students and communicate with parents, examined four years of its own attendance intervention data across hundreds of school districts. It analyzed 3.3 million text messages across 15 states, representing 88,000 students and 22,000 educators. In a recent report, it finds that improving attendance often comes down to a handful of basic tasks. One takeaway: ‘accessible, timely and specific’ messages to parents, students can trim absences.

Guided by Universal Design for Learning (UDL), quick formative assessments can provide multiple ways for students to engage, represent, and express understanding. Using tools such as comprehension questions, informal checks, and exit tickets, teachers can identify student strengths, correct misunderstandings, and plan for next steps. By allowing students to demonstrate understanding in varied ways, formative assessment supports individual needs and informs instructional decisions. 

State Secretary of Education Katie Jenner praised Johnson for her embrace of the science of reading, calling her “a dedicated literacy champion.” Johnson say, “In my 19 years of teaching, literacy is the subject that requires the most effort, care, and understanding of each individual student. It is something that I am always studying and reflecting on, trying to find the best ways to reach every learner in my classroom. I truly believe that students need to have a purpose for everything they do in reading. When I let them in on what that purpose is, they invest more deeply in their learning and take greater ownership of their progress.”

At Sugarloaf Elementary School in Frederick, Maryland, kindergarten teacher Heather Van Eck does something intentional with her students to help make learning stick better during their math lesson on groups of 10—as she roams the room, instead of showing them what they did wrong or providing them the correct answer, she approaches their work with curiosity, prompting them with simple questions tailored to get them to explain their thinking—and often, arrive at a new understanding on their own. It’s one of the ways Van Eck injects more research-backed learning science into her daily classroom practice. By asking students to walk her through their thinking by saying, “Tell me more about how you did this,” she’s helping them cement the concepts she’s trying to teach.

Through our singular focus on the components of how, we have lost sight of why we read in the first place. Like Icarus whose fall makes a splash quite unnoticed, we have forgotten what his wings were for. If kids aren’t taught to understand and appreciate art for art’s sake, they may learn to read, but they won’t learn to love it. They’ll know the words, but not the world they open. And so: We have lost the plot. To fulfill the promise of the science of reading, states, districts, and schools must also reclaim the art of reading—ensuring that every child not only learns to decode and comprehend but also learns to love and live in books.

Alongside explicit instruction in the core components of phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, and comprehension, teachers can weave together a broad (and fun!) range of research-backed strategies to scaffold the crucial skills students need to become good readers. Here are five excellent ways to support budding literacy in your classroom. 

Has the education system, however, done enough to respect the learning characteristics of each young child? Each learner possesses an unimaginably intricate human brain that is capable of modifying itself to respond to an ever-changing world. Each child is equipped with neurological richness through thoughts, plans, memories, and feelings. What could we understand about student learning that could revolutionize schools into more effective learning environments, beginning with very young developing readers?

“Shelf is a biannual magazine celebrating picture book matters, because picture books matter! SHELF was founded in 2024 by illustrator & owner of the picture book shop Shelf Editions, Helen Hancocks, as a love letter to the art of the picture book and to broaden the coverage they receive. Through its pages and the website we hope that we can shine a spotlight on authors, illustrators, the industry and the market as a whole as well as treating picture books as an art form deserving of criticism and focus.” To know more about the publication I just had to go to the source: Helen Hancocks herself. And Helen, happily, was willing to answer a couple of my questions.

The 10 winners of The New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Children’s Books Award are chosen each year by a rotating panel of three expert judges. On the 2025 panel were the Hans Christian Andersen Medal-winning illustrator Peter Sís, the children’s author Tracey Baptiste and the children’s librarian Amber Moller. Children’s book publishers were invited to submit up to 10 picture books published this year in the United States. The judges made their selections from the nearly 800 books we received purely on the basis of artistic merit.

The International Dyslexia Association (IDA) has released its 2025 Dyslexia Definition—the first revision since its widely recognized 2002 definition that has guided research, shaped educational policy, informed legislation, and supported countless families worldwide. The 2025 definition has been revised to be more international, encompassing the biological and environmental influences of dyslexia and expanding the recognition of its secondary consequences, such as challenges to psychological well-being and vocational opportunities. Key changes include moving away from IQ-discrepancy models, recognizing that difficulties exist on a continuum despite effective instruction, and emphasizing the importance of early identification and intervention.

A suburban district’s experience with a virtual provider, experts say, reinforces the importance of sticking to a high-dosage tutoring model. The results add to a growing body of research at a time when tutoring has shifted from being viewed as an emergency stopgap to an ongoing teaching strategy.

New Mexico and Vermont made splashy funding announcements to push early childhood programs forward. Maryland has been charting its own path for years. Thanks to a new $10 million initiative in Montgomery County, Maryland, early childhood educators have a shot at upping the quality of their programs. The lion’s share of the funding, $6.1 million, is earmarked to expand Head Start; the remainder of the $10 million will go to a new $4 million loan program to help existing child care facilities add seats or improve the quality of their centers. 

A beacon is a salient auditory or visual pattern that tethers sound and form in working memory. The teacher’s role is first to sensitize learners to those useful patterns, then help learners anchor the forms to meaning for understanding to take place. This is where teaching becomes artistry: knowing where students are, knowing where they must go, and building memorable bridges—drawing on stories, pictures, clever mnemonics, sensory cues, emotions, or kinesthetic movements to help the form stick.

In response to news that 12th-grade reading scores are at a 30-year low, teenagers diagnose the problem — and warn of the high stakes for their generation. They voiced urgent concerns for the future, warning of a crisis where a generation is left unprepared to understand politics, get a job or read a legal contract. They also made suggestions for how schools, teachers, parents and students themselves could address the problem.

After nearly doubling during the pandemic, the rates of chronic absenteeism in K-12 schools are finally showing steady signs of improvement. “Thousands of students have returned to schools, which means that states are putting in the work,” said Carl Felton, III, a policy analyst at EdTrust, a nonprofit that advocates for underrepresented students. Felton is the author of a new report that looks at how policies in 22 states plus Washington, D.C., have helped improve student attendance. He said there are several things states are doing right, including collecting and publishing reliable data, and investing in early interventions and outreach programs instead of punitive practices.

Nearly 60% of special education teachers reported using AI to develop an IEP or Section 504 plan during the 2024-25 school year. Teachers are increasingly using generative artificial intelligence tools to support students with disabilities in ways that save time for educators and provide best practices for interventions and clear communication for students and parents, according to a new paper from the Center for Democracy and Technology. 
CDT however, warns of risks in using AI to craft individualized education programs, including potential violations of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and privacy laws, as well as possible introduction of inaccuracies and biases.

New analysis compares literacy vs. poverty rates for 10,000 districts, 42,000 schools and 3 million kids. Last year, The 74 set out to find the school districts that were doing the best job of teaching kids how to read. Now, they are expanding that search to individual schools — and have found 2,158 where third-grade reading scores are much higher than might be expected, based on the schools’ poverty rates. The data are available in an interactive online tool. The exceptional schools are in the top 5% of their state in terms of outscoring their expected reading proficiency. For example, Hoover Street Elementary in Los Angeles is a high-poverty school that nonetheless earned high marks

As more schools have introduced phonemic awareness instruction, two big questions have emerged about the most effective way to conduct it. One has to do with how letters are — or are not — integrated. The other question about phonemic awareness instruction centers around what skills to practice, including “advanced phonemic awareness” tasks such as phoneme deletion and substitution. In a new study, teachers used a 2014 version of Heggerty, which included only oral phonemic awareness routines (newer versions have incorporated connections to printed letters). Results showed that the Heggerty program improved students’ phonemic awareness skills, with a statistically significant effect size of .65, which the researchers describe as a moderate to large effect. But students who received Heggerty didn’t do significantly better than those who didn’t on measures of word-reading and oral reading fluency. This was the case for both higher- and lower-performing readers.

For decades, Mississippi students struggled to read, and the state ranked low on education quality. Not anymore. Strong student test scores – dubbed the “Mississippi Miracle” – have catapulted the Southern state into the national spotlight. But the state superintendent at the helm during those literacy reforms has repeatedly pushed back against that buzzy term. Instead, Carey Wright has described the state’s success as the “Mississippi Marathon.” Literacy experts say it happened with the steady drumbeat of a “science of reading” instructional approach — and a trained workforce to back it up. Slowly but surely, they say, the nation’s higher education and K-12 systems are trying to bridge knowledge gaps between science of reading laws and the workforce tasked with teaching children to read.

In Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives, Timothy Shanahan focuses on what role the teacher should play in direct instruction, and how we can and should choose the texts. The result is a devastating takedown of leveled literacy—not because the book is bombastic, but because it’s careful: historically grounded, methodically argued, and relentlessly focused on what actually helps students learn (which, as Shanahan repeatedly points out, is largely missing from efforts to promote leveled literacy). Shanahan’s core claim is bracingly plain. Leveled reading might work if three things were true: (1) we could accurately level texts, (2) we could reliably pinpoint a child’s “reading level,” and (3) students learned more by engaging with texts independently with minimal teacher guidance. 

By middle school, the consequences of early reading failure are compounded by years of frustration. Students who can’t read fluently are excluded from real, meaningful engagement with grade-level content, and their confidence dies. Without intervention, they often disengage from reading altogether, creating a vicious cycle that’s difficult to break free from. If the goal of the science of reading revolution is for every child to read well, we must address this unfinished work: Supporting the many students who are already beyond the prevention stage and now require intervention. By recognizing literacy as a K–12 continuum, states can ensure that support doesn’t disappear the moment a student turns nine.

Social-emotional learning programs can boost students’ academic performances, but a recent analysis found that program length matters when it comes to how much. Researchers from the Yale School of Medicine analyzed 40 studies on SEL programs that included data from more than 33,700 students in first through 12th grade. They found that students who participated in SEL programs saw improved academic performance no matter their grade level or whether their performance was measured with GPA or standardized test scores. When broken out by subject, literacy achievement increased by about 6.3 percentage points and math achievement increased by 3.8 percentage points.

A team of researchers and technologists is partnering to make the science of reading easier to implement in the classroom. The University of Florida Literacy Institute (UFLI) has developed a comprehensive, step-by-step phonics program called UFLI Foundations for teachers to deliver high-quality instruction in phonics that is aligned to the science of reading. UFLI has partnered with Project Read AI, a startup that offers a structured literacy platform powered by artificial intelligence and used by over 150,000 teachers. Together, they created a technology portal to help teachers implement progress monitoring as designed within the UFLI Foundations program.

More often than not, book bans are born of fear — an effort to tamp down stories that hold up a mirror to our country. But how will we understand our history (both our triumphs and our missteps) if certain voices are silenced? How can we expect to grow as a nation if we are not willing to be self-critical? These questions are at the heart of “A Sea of Lemon Trees,” a stunning new historical novel-in-verse by María Dolores Águila. The book sheds light on an unheralded moment in American history when a Mexican community came together to fight educational injustice.

The downsizing of the U.S. Department of Education this year has sparked increased debate among parents, special education advocates and policy experts about how the federal government can best serve students with disabilities. Some critics of the Education Department’s Office of Special Education Programs say the office needs to be overhauled so it can be more responsive to parents’ concerns and school districts’ needs. Others are calling for its complete elimination. OSEP oversees implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act — the nation’s landmark special education law.

The 21st century has brought children’s literature more diversity and a willingness to explore difficult and complex topics. Through it all, children’s authors and illustrators have created titles that teach empathy, reflect the lives of the most marginalized, and share everyone’s story. They have created books that change and save lives, along with those that entertain, connect, and create lifelong readers. And we wanted to know what our readers thought were the most influential titles of the last 25 years.

A new report, based on 120 studies on effective reading instruction conducted across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and covering more than 170 different languages, finds that training educators in evidence-backed instruction—as in the Science of Reading—could help solve the global literacy crisis, while recognizing that “home-language instruction consistently produces better reading outcomes than second-language instruction.” The report, “Effective Reading Instruction in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: What the Evidence Shows” synthesizes the growing research from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). It identifies key skills pupils must learn, and that teachers must learn to teach, to effectively support the acquisition of literacy.

We’ve all heard the argument that keyboards and screens have made this foundational skill obsolete. But research keeps confirming what many teachers have known for years: Handwriting is more than just penmanship — it’s an important part of a child’s thinking and literacy development, particularly during the formative years of pre-K through fifth grade. A recent study, “Writing by Hand Helps Children Learn Letters Better,” reinforces this, showing that the physical act of forming letters strengthens memory and accelerates learning. Far from being a relic of the past, handwriting is a powerful tool that prepares young students for reading, improves their cognitive abilities and builds the groundwork for becoming confident, capable writers.

A prolonged federal government shutdown is causing some school systems and government agencies to provide outreach and extra supports for low-income families and children affected by the likely expiration of benefits. Advocates for low-income families are warning that childhood hunger will increase when funding expires Nov. 1 for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — the nation’s largest federal food assistance program. While SNAP benefits are of immediate concern, some school systems, advocates and policymakers also said they are worried about the long-term sustainability of free-or reduced-price school lunch programs, as well as access to Head Start services if the shutdown isn’t resolved soon.

New Jersey’s largest school system will receive nearly half a million dollars in new federal funding to strengthen reading instruction and engage families in literacy as part of a first-year $13.6 million initiative announced this week by the state’s Education Department. Two grants will support Newark Public Schools’ literacy work, with $400,000 to update instructional materials and train teachers in evidence-based practices and $60,000 to create home-based literacy programs for parents and children under age 3.

Clear family-school communications and robust supports for students with learning differences are just a few ways education systems can improve family-school connections to support student outcomes, nonprofit Learning Heroes said in a new report. The organization used 10 years of research on family-school partnerships to inform best practices that improve these relationships with the aim of driving student success. One of the biggest barriers to family-school partnerships is what the report calls a “perception gap,” or when families believe their child is performing at higher academic levels than what’s really occurring. 

In a 2022 study, researchers discovered that a neuroscience-based professional development program not only improved teachers’ understanding of key brain functions like attention, memory, cognitive load, and emotion, but also led to meaningful changes in classroom instruction, resulting in “significant improvements” in students’ reading competence, mathematical competence, and empathy. Understanding how student brains work doesn’t provide “exact rules that can tell the teachers what to do in every situation,” the researchers explained. Instead, it can help teachers understand the underlying mechanisms that shape learning and provide insights into how to fine-tune instruction to meet the needs of all learners. Here are 15 tips to align your teaching with the science of how student brains work.

As an adult, I’ve mostly avoided horror as a genre; real life is terrifying enough. And my own kids are resolutely anti-scariness. I was terrified of the Old Elephant King in “The Story of Babar.” My daughter was freaked out by “The Very Hungry Caterpillar.” Then came my niece. Lucy opened up a whole haunted world I didn’t know as a child, or with my children. And as she got older, she recommended books to me.

Beginning last year, transitional kindergartners were not assessed for English language proficiency, a decision many TK teachers celebrated. For now, California has no formal way of determining transitional kindergartners’ English proficiency, which means schools miss out on federal and state funding for English learners. Schools are not required by law to provide students with language services or report their academic or language progress on the California School Dashboard. But this summer, the state Legislature set aside $10 million in the budget to select a new screener for schools to use to identify TK students who need more help learning English. The state superintendent of public instruction has to select a list of screeners by March 31, which will then be tested in some districts in 2026-27 before requiring screening in 2027-28.

“The Southern surge” — learning gains in a number of Southern states — has drawn a remarkable wave of attention in recent weeks. A growing chorus of voices say these states offer a playbook to reverse a decade of nationwide learning declines. It’s “the biggest education story of the last few years,” wrote David Brooks in the New York Times. It’s even come up in the New Jersey governor’s race. Is the Southern surge real? And if so, what can other states learn from it? Here’s what I found: While there has not exactly been a region-wide “Southern surge,” there have been some notable Southern success stories, especially in fourth grade. There appear to be lessons to learn from these states, particularly around a specific set of policies designed to help young children learn to read.

More than 22 million children — mostly from low-income and families of color — face barriers to care after 3 p.m., according to a new report. Thousands of American families, mostly low-income and families of color, face persistent barriers enrolling their children in after school and summer programs, according to a report released earlier this month from the nonprofit advocacy group Afterschool Alliance. The America After 3PM report found in a survey of more than 30,500 parents earlier this year  about 77% who want to enroll their children in after school programs can’t — most citing cost, accessibility and availability as the main issues. 

North Carolina stands out nationally with all 18 fundamental principles of early literacy firmly in place to support educators and student learning. The foundation has been laid for a robust, sustainable implementation structure. While the statewide rollout of LETRS professional development was both powerful and necessary, the next phase requires ongoing coaching aligned to data and high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) to deepen and sustain these early gains. Effective implementation takes time, commitment, and hard work. For science of reading laws to succeed, we need to figure out how to best support educators. They need to both feel like they are not alone and believe the journey will be worth it.

Timothy Shanahan, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has spent his career evaluating education research and helping teachers figure out what works best in the classroom. In his new book, “Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives,” Shanahan takes aim at one of the most common teaching practices in American classrooms: matching students with “just-right” books. He argues that the approach — where students read different texts depending on their assessed reading level — is holding many children back. Teachers spend too much time testing students and assigning leveled books, he says, instead of helping all students learn how to understand challenging texts.

Devan Chopra is reading to a pre-school classroom in Grafton, West Virginia. She’s holding up the book Pete the Cat. “I’m here because I really want to spread the love of reading,” she said. The high school junior came to this Head Start program at the Webster Pre School as a volunteers with the LiTEArary Society, an international group started in West Virginia that gets new picture books to preschool children to develop a love of reading. The group collects books and takes them to classrooms like this one for students to take home. It’s an area where books are not always readily available to children.

While changes to policy and practice in states across the country are encouraging, we will not be able to dramatically increase the number of students reading on grade level without more deliberate engagement of parents. We need to better equip parents and caregivers to accelerate literacy gains through greater transparency and accountability, and by addressing common system gaps. States, districts, and schools must harness parent power to increase the impact of existing policies and enlist parents and caregivers as partners in boosting literacy instruction implementation. The key components are: (1) Equipping parents and caregivers as partners in accountability; (2) Increasing awareness of student literacy performance; and (3) Providing actionable recommendations for parents and caregivers.

As a teacher, I want to show students that science is not about memorizing information, but about asking questions regarding the world around you and investigating to find the answers. When I first started teaching elementary science, I stuck to the textbook and videos I could find online. It felt impossible to plan hands-on activities for my 24 students and fit everything into our 30-minute science block, even if I desperately wanted them to have active learning experiences. Students moving around the room with science material can feel chaotic. I learned that with a few systems in place, these experiences can be fun and meaningful for both students and teachers. Incorporating hands-on activities in the elementary science classroom can help learning feel worthwhile and memorable.

Ohio’s drive to boost reading scores using the science of reading has had a rocky start in the two years since Gov. Mike DeWine fought for the change, with scores going the wrong direction. Even with millions spent on new textbooks, and teachers required to take online science of reading training, third grade English Language Arts proficiency fell from 62% in spring of 2023 to 61% earlier this year. It’s still unclear whether the scores are cause for alarm or just a natural part of the transition as Ohio joins the flood of states shifting to phonics-heavy lessons to help students decode and understand words better. Some supporters of the science of reading believe small gains should happen almost immediately, even if it takes longer for large improvements statewide.

Analysis of Louisiana schools reveals that it’s very difficult to earn a high overall rating if low-income kids are not doing well. A handful of states, including Louisiana, Florida and Mississippi, each have accountability systems that give schools points based on the academic growth of their lowest-performing students. Given the national trends where performance has fallen further among these children, more states should consider such measures. While policymakers can take some heart in knowing that good schools tend to be consistently good across student groups, the flip side is also true: Bad schools tend to be bad for everyone, and state policymakers should focus more on district-level performance issues than within-school gaps.

The September request from the U.S. Department of Education for information asked how the Institute of Education Sciences could function more smoothly across its four centers; better meet state and local leaders’, educators’, and parents’ needs; deliver more timely and accessible statistics and research; modernize its peer review of research proposals and IES reports and grantmaking; and scale up the dissemination of research-backed practices. Some organizations proposed creating grants to communicate concepts beyond journal publications aimed at academics, translating findings into tools like dashboards or policy briefs, and simplifying how educators can search through research so they can ask questions in “plain English.” Others suggested streamlining IES surveys, and releasing preliminary research findings at key study milestones, rather than waiting until the studies conclude. Many organizations urged the department to uphold its historical role of collecting data—one of the earliest federal undertakings in education dating back to the Civil War era.

The evidence is incontrovertible that the great majority of teachers haven’t been brought up to speed to teach reading, which is a lot more demanding than you think. Still, no surprise, there’s no ready fix. Improvements in each of the training modes are necessary. But there is one reform that can be a gamechanger: It’s classroom coaching that allows well-trained coaches to work one-on-one with classroom teachers. In fact, classroom coaches are key drivers in state Superintendent Carey Wright’s flagship early literacy initiative. Wright, who came to nationwide fame for the remarkable increase in literacy that occurred when she was state superintendent in Mississippi, cites classroom coaches as a vital, if not indispensable, feature of the “Mississippi miracle.”

Imaginative play areas that once occupied a dominant part of the kindergarten landscape—think dress-up corners, easels and paints, stacks of blocks—have, in many instances, been replaced with literacy corners and science centers. Getting along with classmates and learning to follow simple instructions from a teacher also have been sidelined as the primary goals of kindergarten. Now, most kindergarten teachers are focused primarily on preparing young learners for future academic success. The changes have not gone unnoticed by educators, parents, and policymakers. In recent years, some educators have begun to push back against the “academization” of kindergarten. These voices have gotten the attention of state policymakers; in turn, a few states have begun to push for a return to play in kindergarten, including Connecticut, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, and Oregon.

While no official plan is in place yet, it’s Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s goal to shut down the department, said an agency spokesperson. As rumors swirled that special education programs could soon be leaving their longtime home at the U.S. Department of Education, a spokesperson confirmed on Tuesday that the agency is “exploring additional partnerships” with other federal agencies to support this programming. Both President Donald Trump and McMahon have named the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as a potential partner in overseeing federal special education activities. 

The Kentucky Department of Education’s Kentucky Reading Academies have rapidly advanced literacy outcomes for early learners since the professional learning program began three years ago, according to a new report from a third-party evaluator. The report shows increases in student reading scores and educator knowledge in evidence-based literacy practices. The goal behind the academies is to promote educators’ knowledge, beliefs and classroom instruction in evidence-based literacy practices to improve student reading outcomes. Facilitated by the Kentucky Department of Education’s (KDE’s) Division of Early Literacy, the academies provide access to Lexia’s Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, better known as LETRS, an evidence-based professional learning that is rooted in the science of reading.

Works by Jane Godwin, Joshua David Stein and Matthew Diffee find new lenses through which to explore an old subject, in lovely and surprising ways. Although friendship is the subject of countless picture books, it’s incredibly difficult to “explain people” to a young child in an authentic, convincing way, and with all the friendship books out there it’s even harder to find a new lens through which to explore the subject. These three books accomplish just that.

Jumpstart, a national organization that recruits and trains adults to teach foundational literacy skills to preschoolers, is partnering with Little Free Library to expand the 20th anniversary celebration for its Read for the Record early literacy initiative. Read for the Record is, according to a release issued by the two organizations, “the world’s largest shared reading experience, uniting millions of readers to read the same book on the same day while raising awareness of the critical importance of early literacy.” More than 30 million people have participated in Read for the Record since 2005.

Across Philadelphia, young kids are waiting months and sometimes years for early intervention services that they are legally entitled to, according to families, therapy providers, and advocates Chalkbeat spoke with. Federal law states a child must receive services as soon as possible after an evaluation team completes their Individualized Education Program, or IEP. Pennsylvania has interpreted that to mean 14 days. But one provider said the list she can access of children waiting for speech therapy — one of several early intervention services — is sometimes more than 2,000 families long.

North Carolina is one of several states that have passed legislation in recent years to align classroom reading instruction with the research on how children learn to read. But ensuring all students have access to research-backed instruction is a marathon, not a sprint, said education leaders and researchers from across the country. Teachers need coaching, ongoing training to move from ‘science of reading’ knowledge to practice, researchers suggest.

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Germany, and other institutions have completed the biggest genetic study ever on dyslexia. Their recent paper in Translational Psychiatry reveals several new areas of DNA that are linked to a higher chance of having dyslexia. The researchers were able to identify 13 new genetic loci linked to dyslexia, which were implicated in early brain development processes.

The editors of The New York Times Book Review bring you board books for babies, R.L. Stine’s favorite Halloween books for kids, zany read-alouds, the essential Shel Silverstein, graphic novels for Dav Pilkey fans, bedtime reads, stories to soothe anxious toddlers, books about siblings, Lemony Snicket’s favorite hidden gems and more!

At Gilles-Sweet Elementary in Fairview Park, Ohio, kindergarten teacher Keri Laughlin combines movement and phonics to help her students build the foundational literacy skills they’ll need as readers. Phonics can be challenging for young learners, but by turning the lesson into a multisensory experience, Laughlin gives students multiple ways to connect letters and sounds—so that learning sticks in both their minds and their bodies. Laughlin uses three different strategies to teach phonemes, each one offering students a way to physically connect letter sounds to movement.

Teachers across California are rushing to learn how to test students on vocabulary, how well they know their letters and the sounds they make, and how quickly they can name objects or letters in a row. These are some of the skills to be measured by new screening tests that school districts are using for the first time to evaluate all children in kindergarten through second grade to see if they may be at risk for reading difficulties, such as dyslexia. Alongside new laws that aim to change the way reading is taught in school and how teachers are prepared to do so, the screenings — available in English and Spanish — form part of a comprehensive, yet fragmented, state literacy plan now being rolled out after years in the making to get more California children reading by the third grade.

In state after state, governors and legislatures have enacted “science of reading” laws intended to overhaul how children are taught to read—mandating changes in curricula, teacher training, intervention, and accountability. They’re meant to boost weak reading scores and close literacy gaps. Yet an important question remains: Will these laws live up to their potential? This year’s Wonkathon asks: What needs to happen next—at the state, district, and school levels—for the science-of-reading revolution to fulfill its promise and ensure that far more children learn to read well? For eleven years now, we at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute have hosted an annual Wonkathon on our Flypaper blog to generate substantive conversation around key issues in education reform. 

The author of the Seeds of America trilogy recommends books that run the gamut from Native American history to the civil rights movement. Anderson says, “Writers of historical fiction for children bear a special responsibility. We are called to balance our duty to reflect the past accurately with our obligation to write developmentally appropriate stories for our readers. The wonderful books below fulfill that mission with artistry and craft.”