Today’s Literacy Headlines

“Reading and math scores were declining even before the pandemic—especially for the lowest-performing students,” Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said. “Our challenge isn’t just to get back to normal; it’s to reverse decades of deterioration.” Why have scores on this national gauge of student achievement faltered over the last decade, and how can schools reverse that pattern? Those are complex, thorny questions. Education Week spoke with experts to dig into the factors that could be shaping the results.

For decades, we’ve bemoaned how remarkably little our students know about history. There are many reasons for this, but a critical one is that we rarely take advantage of their first years in school to provide structured and consistent social studies instruction. This is compounded by our failure to provide elementary teachers much, if any, history training during their preparation classes. The result is that teachers are often uncomfortable teaching it. A comprehensive, content-rich history curriculum offers a superior approach, one that distinguishes between truths and myths, primary sources and secondary ones. Exposed consistently to coherent, compelling stories, students would build a cohesive understanding of our history that prepares them much more effectively to carry on the civic work of perfecting our imperfect Union.

As a transitional kindergarten teacher in Oakland, California, my job is to get the youngest learners ready for school as part of California’s universal public preschool program. I teach my students how to get up when they fall, how to open a carton of milk without incident, and how to master the skills they will need to eventually become readers. Nursery rhymes to teach phonological awareness so students can recognize and manipulate the spoken parts of words. Play-Doh to teach phonics so they understand the relationship between letters and sounds. Dramatic play to teach comprehension since acting out stories can help kids better understand them. To me, this early literacy work is integral to addressing the current literacy crisis. 

Almost five years have passed since COVID-19 first disrupted America’s schools, and new data, known as the Nation’s Report Card, offers cause for hope — and concern. The good news: In math, many students have made up at least some of the academic ground they lost during the pandemic. The bad news: In both reading and math, most fourth- and eighth-graders in 2024 still performed below pre-pandemic 2019 levels. What’s more, while these achievement declines were exacerbated by the pandemic, they appear to have begun even before COVID-19, raising important questions about why students are still struggling and what educators and policymakers can do about it.

Most American students are still performing below their pre-pandemic counterparts in reading and math, while the yawning gap between high-achieving and low-performing students got even wider, data from “the nation’s report card” shows. Results released Wednesday from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, paint a sobering picture of academic haves and have-nots. Scores are increasing for many students who already do well, while struggling students stagnated or fell even further behind their peers. That’s making a trend that began about a decade ago even more pronounced.

The kids are not bouncing back. The results of a major national test released Wednesday showed that in 2024, reading and math skills of fourth and eighth grade students were still significantly below those of students in 2019, the last administration of the test before the pandemic. In reading, students slid below the devastatingly low achievement levels of 2022, which many educators had hoped would be a nadir. The test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), is often called the nation’s report card. Administered by the federal government, it tracks student performance in fourth and eighth grades and serves as a national yardstick of achievement. Scores for the nation’s lowest-performing students were worse in both reading and math than those of students two years ago. The only bright spot was progress by higher-achieving children in math. 

Erin Entrada Kelly wanted to write a love letter to one of her all-time favorite books—2010 Newbery Medal winner When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead. The result, Kelly’s middle grade novel The First State of Being, just won the 2025 Newbery Medal. The First State of Being separated itself from a strong group of Newbery contenders. “Erin Entrada Kelly juggled so many things and did them all beautifully,” said Maeve Knoth, Newbery committee chair. “This is science fiction, adventure, kid-taking-his-mom’s-car-without-permission, and even historical fiction if you are too young to have lived through Y2K! There are three important central characters who are distinct and well-drawn. The setting is so vivid—both time periods and place—and Kelly’s themes about each of us being a part of making history and awareness of every moment as we live it are important and timely. The book is also a great romp.”

On January 27, the American Library Association (ALA) announced the top books, digital media, video, and audiobooks for children and young adults—including the Caldecott, Coretta Scott King, Newbery, and Printz awards—at ALA’s 2025 LibLearnX conference in Phoenix. The First State of Being, written by Erin Entrada Kelly, is the 2025 Newbery Medal winner. Chooch Helped, illustrated by Rebecca Lee Kunz, is the 2025 Caldecott Medal winner. A complete list of the 2025 award winners follows.

If you’re a narrative lover, you certainly aren’t alone. Most literacy-oriented educators think just like you. But it’s important to recognize that many young readers think differently. Expository-loving info-kids aren’t interested in making an emotional connection with a main character, and they don’t read to escape or become immersed in the world of the book. Instead, they read to learn. They want to soak up ideas and information about the real world. That want to understand how it works and their place in it.

Upper elementary teachers can guide their students to look forward to revising their writing with this positive, reflective approach. I blend this approach with more traditional methods such as step-by-step procedures, checklists, and rubrics. Each year, I open with an informal writing assessment to analyze students’ needs and interweave some or all of the following strategies to build a more complete understanding of the process.

Nearly everyone backs the latest research on teaching kids to read. Why did it take eight years to update the UNC System’s literacy curriculum? The UNC System’s efforts began years before the recent surge of interest in the science of reading. Then-president Margaret Spellings—previously George W. Bush’s secretary of education—commissioned a review of the system’s educator preparation programs in 2017. It found highly varied approaches to literacy instruction and many using the debunked method of “using context and pictures to decode words.”

Educators who serve multilingual learners can adopt many different strategies to support their literacy development, including the use of reading comprehension templates and the practice of incorporating a student’s home language into the classroom. Pamella Moura is a special education doctoral student at Michigan State University who authored a 2024 paper on reading comprehension best practices for multilingual learners. To incorporate multilingual learners’ own languages into the curriculum — for example, in spelling lessons — Moura suggests translating the words on a search engine, or even asking the students themselves to do this, and then dictating the words in both forms to the class. This can be done across many different subjects, particularly those that are “vocabulary-heavy.”

The ALA Youth Media Awards were announced at LibLearnX in Phoenix, AZ, on Monday. Here are the winners on children’s literature’s biggest day. John Newbery Medal: The First State of Being by Erin Entrada Kelly. Randolph Caldecott Medal: Chooch Helped illustrated by Rebecca Lee Kunz. 

A prominent scholar critiqued the evidence for including children with disabilities in general education classrooms. Advocates, parents and teachers argued for inclusion, against inclusion and for some hybrid of the two. The director of education at the Learning Disabilities Association of America weighed in, as did the commissioner of special education research at the U.S. Department of Education. More than 160 people commented on one Reddit discussion about the story. Here’s a sampling of views I received or saw on social media. 

Deep, transferable learning depends on domain-specific knowledge, and thinking itself is inextricably linked to the content of thought. A robust foundation of knowledge is not merely the raw material for thought, it is the scaffolding that makes higher-order thinking possible. None of this is news, but neither is it dominant—yet—in education thought or practice. A new open access book Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The Knowledge Revival dives deeply into these ideas and makes a case for knowledge-rich curriculum that embraces the role of disciplinary knowledge in education.

We are far more likely to use our hands to type or swipe than pick up a pen. But we lose something when handwriting disappears. We lose measurable cognitive skills, and we also lose the pleasure of using our hands and a writing implement in a process that for thousands of years has allowed humans to make our thoughts visible to one another. We lose the sensory experience of ink and paper and the visual pleasure of the handwritten word. We lose the ability to read the words of the dead.

When schools create a welcoming environment and celebrate linguistic diversity, they help foster global awareness, tolerance, and understanding. One way for schools to reaffirm the identities of their students—and impart a universal lesson that multilingualism is an asset to be preserved and leveraged—is to recognize International Mother Language Day, on February 21. A middle school teacher shares her favorite ways to celebrate linguistic diversity, both on International Mother Language Day and year-round.

A new study has found evidence of big gains in students’ reading ability from using one specific phonics program—and suggests that consistent implementation is key to getting the strongest results. The foundational-skills curriculum, UFLI Foundations, was created by researchers at the University of Florida Literacy Institute. When kindergarten and 1st grade teachers in one Florida district used the program for a year, their students grew at a much faster rate than similar students in other classrooms in the district that continued business-as-usual reading instruction. Teachers who followed the program more closely saw better results than those who didn’t teach lessons in the recommended sequence, or with all of the listed steps.

Students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) such as autism and Down syndrome are often left behind when it comes to literacy instruction – casualties of the misperception that at best, they could only read by learning to recognize common words by sight. But researchers are finding that students with IDD, like their peers without disabilities, can benefit from a more complex approach, including phonics, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. 

Findings from almost 450 studies demonstrate U.S. parents’ influence on student engagement, well-being and learning. When kids get older, the best thing parents can do to support their engagement and learning in school is “discussion and encouragement.” Translation: Talk to them about what they learn at school and what is happening in their lives, cheer them on in their academic pursuits and help them get through hard times. Meaningful discussions about their kids’ interests, experiences and challenges, their thoughts and feelings serve as the foundation for children’s love of learning, the fertile ground that breeds student motivation, curiosity and engagement. This, much more than direct homework assistance, helps teens grow and plays a crucial role in shaping their relationship with learning.

Being an independent learner means a student can carry more of a cognitive load in the class without so much reliance on their teacher. A lot of this comes from educators designing and creating innovative opportunities for students to learn language, continue to expand their neuroplasticity, and become more critical thinkers.

Since 2010, Jami Rhue has been a school librarian at Providence Englewood Charter School, a preK-8 school on the South Side of Chicago serving primarily Black and brown students who live in a community colloquially known as “Chiraq.” Though she didn’t initially see herself ever becoming a school librarian, Rhue has come to love the dynamism and variety of her job. She teaches concepts as wide-ranging as American Sign Language, critical thinking, typing, conducting research and writing in cursive. And she gets to work with children from pre-K all the way through eighth grade in any given week — a challenging but rewarding charge. “It’s the best-kept secret in education, to be a school librarian,” Rhue says with pride. “You get to interact with everybody. It’s a treat.”

With more information than ever at our fingertips, there’s a sense of rush to take it all in and “skim.” Here’s what the experts say about our reading habits—and whether you should change them. According to experts, skimming—where you skip over words and sections to grasp the main idea of a text—is a common reading strategy. That’s totally fine, says Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia—as long as skimming or scanning doesn’t get in the way of understanding. Experts often contrast skimming with “close” reading, when a reader connects new information to prior knowledge, asks questions, and develops a deeper understanding of the text (although the exact definition is contentious).

In his long-running Village Voice comic strip and in his many plays and screenplays, he took delight in skewering politics, relationships and human nature. In the mid-1950s, Norton Juster, a neighbor of Mr. Feiffer’s in Brooklyn, invited him to illustrate a children’s book he was writing, “The Phantom Tollbooth.” An ingenious kaleidoscope of wordplay arguably akin in style to Lewis Carroll, the book, published in 1961, was an instant hit. Later in life he derived great pleasure from writing and drawing children’s books, some in collaboration with his daughter Kate, among them “The Man in the Ceiling” (1993), “Bark, George” (1999), “By the Side of the Road” (2002), “The Daddy Mountain” (2004) and “A Room With a Zoo” (2005). A 2010 reunion project with Mr. Juster, “The Odious Ogre,” was warmly reviewed.

The children’s publishing industry is uniting to support a fundraising initiative launched by four picture book authors in response to last week’s devastating wildfires in Los Angeles. The online auction will run from January 20 to 26, raising funds for the California Community Foundation’s Wildfire Relief Fund, the Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation, the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, and the Animal Wellness Foundation’s Wildfire Relief Fund. Top auction items include a complete set of signed Diary of a Wimpy Kid books with an original sketch from creator Jeff Kinney and virtual school visits from Kate DiCamillo.

Science-based teaching can not only raise the level of student achievement overall but also make the system more equitable by narrowing gaps between high- and low-achievers. Unfortunately, this kind of teaching is happening in only a few small pockets in the United States, and many educators are either unfamiliar with the principles behind it or view them with skepticism or outright hostility due to their training. What can be done to overcome those obstacles and bring science-informed teaching to the millions of children who could benefit from it?

On a cold winter morning, kindergartners gather on a rug in Holly Hins’ classroom at Woodbury’s Middleton Elementary School. Her students are learning to recognize sounds, decode words and learn phonetic patterns to let them read and spell with confidence. Called structured literacy, this method boasts decades of research showing it as the most effective way to teach kids to read. But it’s not the way Hins used to teach, and it’s not how she learned literacy instruction in college. Like elementary school teachers around Minnesota and the nation, she’s had to come to terms with a difficult reality: What she was doing wasn’t working, and she had to change.

Miguel Cardona, the nation’s 12th education secretary, said he’s most proud of the work that focused on instruction and put more resources in schools. Despite the challenges wrought by the public health emergency, Cardona set high goals for student academic achievement, expansion of career pathways, increased access to student mental health services and more opportunities for multilingualism. During Cardona’s tenure, the U.S. Department of Education was also tasked with managing the largest historic one-time influx of federal funding provided by Congress to help schools recover from the pandemic. 

Teaching writing in the elementary grades comes with its own set of challenges: helping students plan their writing, organizing materials, providing appropriate drafting tools, differentiating instruction to a wide range of abilities, and ensuring that publishing is manageable for young learners. To better overcome these obstacles, I’ve developed a simple but effective solution: DIY booklets. These custom-made, stapled booklets compile all the materials students need to be supported through a writing project—graphic organizers, drafting pages, anchor charts, revision tools, and editing checklists—into one well-organized system.

Rural education often can seem like an afterthought to policymakers and scholars, who tend to design reforms aimed at urban and suburban areas, even though 20% of the nation’s students are educated in rural schools. This lack of rural research and focus has perpetuated many myths and misconceptions about rural education that overlook the strengths and opportunities for students who attend rural schools. As scholars who study rural education, we compiled a list of three facts about rural education accompanied by the myths that would help policymakers better design programs to support rural students.

To create Literary Hub’s inaugural list of the most anticipated children’s books of the year, we turned to the experts, asking authors and illustrators of books for young people to share which upcoming releases they’re most looking forward to reading. Here are their choices: a wonderfully eclectic range of books to keep readers of all ages and interests turning pages throughout the year.

To get a better sense of how SEL approaches are (or are not) working in K-12 schools, the EdWeek Research Center asked the following open-ended question in a December 2024 survey of teachers, principals, and district leaders: What approaches, if any, do you find are most effective in teaching SEL skills in your classroom, school, or district? The responses showed a wide range of opinions about what does or does not work, from outright opposition to the concept to questions about its impact on academic learning to a full embrace of SEL as a key tool to improve student learning.

Teachers can make small shifts in their classroom design to boost engagement, spark curiosity, and celebrate success. Motivation doesn’t have to be a battle of wills. By reducing friction, using visual cues, sparking curiosity, and celebrating progress, you can create a classroom environment where engagement and success feel natural. You’ll be amazed at how these seemingly minor changes can lead to big results—not just in your students’ motivation, but also in their confidence and enthusiasm for learning.

New estimates show that 61.8 million people around the globe have autism and that the developmental disability is among the most common health issues facing youth. As of 2021, researchers found that 1 in 127 people worldwide were on the spectrum, according to findings published recently in the journal The Lancet. Autism was twice as likely to affect males versus females and there was high prevalence among young people, with the condition ranking in the top 10 causes of non-fatal health burden for those under age 20, the study found.

Governor Kim Reynolds and the Iowa Department of Education have announced a statewide investment of over $3.5 million to provide every first-grade student with decodable book packs to take home and keep, reinforcing classroom instruction. “In partnership with their classroom teachers, families across Iowa can use these evidence-based book packs to reinforce phonics and decoding skills with their children anytime, anywhere,” said Iowa Department of Education director McKenzie Snow. “These decodable books meet students where they are, supporting reading comprehension that unlocks a child’s lifetime of potential.”

Hooray! With the ALA Youth Media Awards on the near horizon (Monday, January 27th at 8 a.m. MT to be precise) it’s never been a better time to debate some possible winners of the Caldecott Award. Today, I hand over to Kate an unprecedented FOUR possible contenders (rather than my usual three)! Will she opt for the vibrant father-daughter vibes of My Daddy Is a Cowboy, the rainbow wry-wit of Touch the Sky, the luminous family-centric storytelling of Joyful Song, or the heartfelt sincerity of Home in a Lunchbox? Only this podcast can say for sure.

Clearly, decoding is an important and fundamental reading skill. So why don’t we test for it in the United States? England does. Starting in 2012, the Brits started giving a phonics check to all six-year-olds. England’s phonics check is a light-touch intervention with relatively low stakes. But it has driven dramatic increases in student performance. Could the U.S. benefit from an England-style phonics check? Sure, we already have plenty of reading tests, some of which give educators a good sense of a student’s early literacy skills. But there are key differences in how American students are assessed, and we could learn some lessons from the Brits.

 A prominent professor of special education is about to ignite a fierce debate over a tenet of his field, that students with disabilities should be educated as much as possible alongside their peers in general education classrooms, a strategy known as inclusion. In a paper that reviews more than 50 years of research, Douglas Fuchs of Vanderbilt University and the American Institutes for Research along with two colleagues at both institutions, argues that the academic benefits of including students with disabilities in general education classrooms are not settled science despite the fact that numerous studies have found that children with disabilities learn more that way

Children must be able to read words like “a,” “and,” “not,” “now,” and “come,” said Kari Kurto, the national science of reading project director at the Reading League, an organization that promotes science-based reading instruction. It’s just that memorization isn’t the route to get there. Decades of research has shown that phonics instruction—showing children how letters represent sounds and blend together to form words—is the most effective way to teach beginning readers how to identify new words on the page. When children learn these phonics patterns, and practice reading words using them, those words get stored in their memory.

Word puzzles such as Wordle aren’t just entertaining—they’re powerful tools for building literacy skills in young learners. Here we’d like to provide additional information about Wordle as well as other recommended metalinguistic word puzzles that can be completed online and/or in board game format. There are four games offered by The New York Times that we recommend for use in the classroom with elementary-aged children.

When intentionally designed, digital environments offer a lot of opportunities for learning, engagement and automatizing skills. But for learning to read and for reading comprehension the most effective strategy is to have adult support. The appeal of digital technology is that it is often seen as being able to take the place of an adult; maybe one day, but we’re not there yet!

There is a literacy crisis in Illinois, and it threatens the futures of Illinois’ children – but it can be fixed. Proven reforms used by other states can be promoted by Illinois lawmakers and embraced by local school districts. Illinois should focus efforts on investing in and improving literacy education for students in the first through third grades using these five literacy solutions based on proven reforms from Mississippi, Florida and Colorado.

Thelma Ramsey-Bryant became principal of John L. Costley Middle School in East Orange, New Jersey, at the height of the COVID pandemic in 2020. But the global health crisis wasn’t the only hurdle she faced as she began her new role. Ramsey-Bryant quickly realized that many of her 8th graders needed help with reading fluency and comprehension. Ramsey-Bryant and her team have worked to make remedial reading tasks feel age-appropriate and to identify connections to student behavior.

Teaching children to read at an early age is not only fundamental, it’s also a major boost to their overall pediatric health care. According to an American Academy of  Pediatrics study, parents should begin reading to children at birth. Ready Readers Executive Director Angela Sears Spittal says early literacy directly connects to pediatric health care. Shared reading helps develop social and emotional development in toddlers, she said.

Soo-Young Hong, associate professor of child, youth and family studies, is leading a three-year project focused on strengthening rural early childhood educators’ competence and confidence in teaching science and engineering concepts to young children. Hong and her team aim to develop and test a practice-based professional development model for early childhood science education in center- and home-based early care and education settings serving children ages 3-5 in rural Nebraska. 

These formative assessment strategies for the early grades can save time as you, and your students, discover where they are in the learning process.

In early 2024, initial reports indicated that tutoring might not only help kids catch up academically after the pandemic but could also combat chronic absenteeism. More recent research, however, suggests that prediction may have been overly optimistic. Stanford University researchers have been studying Washington, D.C.’s $33 million investment in tutoring, which provided extra help to more than 5,000 of the district’s 100,000 students in 2022-23, the second year of a three-year tutoring initiative. When researchers looked at these students’ test scores, they found minimal to modest improvements in reading or math.

Diverse BookFinder (DBF) is an online resource designed for librarians, educators, parents, book creators, and publishers committed to finding and promoting children’s books featuring characters who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. Recently revamped with new branding and a more accessible, professional design, DBF includes features aimed at making it easier to discover inclusive literature. 

A longtime special education teacher passes along his step-by-step guide for all parts of the IEP process. The best IEPs are organized, transparent, and collaborative. 

Your imaginary audience has a note taped to them: “I can’t read. I can’t talk. I don’t care about stories, plots or characters. What do you have for me?” What we have for them, it turns out, are board books. When you look to capture the attention of a baby, your (or at least my) impulse is not to try to teach them anything or be clever. You know they’re not receiving those messages yet. You’re simply hoping to engage them minute to minute.

Families in Schools is one local organization that’s trying to boost literacy rates in Los Angeles. In an extensive report on the district’s literacy crisis published in February, the group called for LAUSD to adopt more approaches aligned with the science of reading, which the district is doing. And now, Families in Schools is working on more programs to boost literacy in LAUSD schools under an effort called ReadLA.

Developing students’ language skills can be more engaging with games that address vocabulary, grammar, speaking, listening, reading, and writing.

Clearly, decoding is an important and fundamental reading skill. So why don’t we test for it in the United States? England does. Starting in 2012, the Brits started giving a phonics check to all 6-year-olds. At the end of their first year of school (equivalent to kindergarten), kids are given a list of 40 words to read out loud. Half of them are real words, like “chip,” and half are nonsense words, like “bep.” Teachers listen to each student read the words and then score them on how many they decode correctly. England’s phonics check is a light-touch intervention with relatively low stakes. But it has driven dramatic increases in student performance.

Middle school readers often have momentum from elementary school reading habits — like read-alouds, interactive reading in the classroom and making connections to real life through non-fiction project-based learning. But for high schoolers, developing reading stamina can be difficult because these practices are often discontinued sometime in middle school. However, librarians like Julia Torres have identified several strategies to get teens excited about reading.

Comprehension needs to be differentiated from skill-based components of reading and treated as the complex behavior it is. Comprehension is not a skill or set of skills; rather, it is a complex multidimensional ability. In fact, reading comprehension is one of the most complex activities that we engage in on a regular basis, and our ability to do so is dependent upon a wide range of knowledge and skills. These include relevant background knowledge and reasoning abilities. Also, like listening comprehension, it is dependent on well-developed language abilities, including not only vocabulary knowledge but also an understanding of grammar and text-level structures (e.g., pronoun referencing and story structure). In addition, it is influenced by the nature of the text being read (e.g., its topic, complexity, and cohesion) and the purpose of reading (e.g., to study for a test or evaluate an opinion piece). Finally, it is acquired not in a few short years, but over one’s lifetime. 

Nevada has a unique opportunity to strengthen our foundation and transform the future for our children by making a bold commitment to early literacy and the expansion of early childhood programs. As the fifth largest school district in the country, only 39.3 percent of Clark County third graders are proficient in reading — a critical marker of long-term success. For students from low-income families and other marginalized communities, the numbers are even lower. Research shows that when students develop strong literacy skills by third grade, they are far more likely to succeed in school and beyond.

What does it mean for a high school student to read well? The answer is multilayered. Teenage readers need a solid foundation, encompassing the ability to read fluently and understand grade-appropriate vocabulary. But they also rely on more nuanced skills. One of these is disciplinary literacy—the idea that experts in different disciplines, such as history, science, and literature, communicate their ideas in distinct ways.

As everyone involved in American schooling continued to claw their way back to some semblance of normal in 2024, the year in education was anything but. One need look no further than Education Next’s annual round-up of the 20 most-read articles to observe some themes in what most concerned our readers about education in this evolving post-pandemic period. Lagging student achievement and the interventions that address it draw readers’ interest.

Tune in, talk more, take turns is good advice for anyone hoping to build their conversational skills. It is also the name of an enrichment program created by the University of Chicago’s TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health to promote equity in children’s language acquisition and to reduce disparities in developmental outcomes for children from low-income families.

We’re down to the big final lists of the year now. If you’ve been following this series this month then you’ve seen me me talk about a lot of nonfiction picture books until now. This list takes the best of them, as well as a couple titles that don’t slot neatly into categories. I consider these the best of the best. The ones you cannot miss. See if you can find one you missed before now.