The American Reading Crisis and How to Ensure the Phonics Renaissance Succeeds
Why the laudable return to phonics is not enough
Reading scores for 13-year-olds have dropped to levels not seen for decades, according to a June report by The National Assessment of Educational Progress’ (NAEP), also known as “The Nation’s Report Card”. That discouraging news follows the NAEP’s revelation last year that only 33% of American fourth graders achieved proficiency in reading.
To help America’s struggling students, at least 32 states have already turned to the neo-phonics “science of reading” movement for answers. They have passed laws or pursued related measures, often with bipartisan support and an enthusiastic response from teachers.
The renewed emphasis on phonics is good news, but if not augmented by additional reforms, we will struggle to raise truly literate Americans. Those reforms, at a minimum, should include ensuring educators properly connect science-based phonics to rich content and language arts education; developing highly qualified classroom reading teams led by excellent teachers; and creating a new type of teacher-parent reading partnership.
The return to sound-it-out phonics instruction supported by cognitive science comes after a decades-long experiment in balanced literacy education championed by figures such as Dr. Lucy Calkins, founder of the Columbia University Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. Calkins’ curricula and philosophies have been embedded in many schools around the nation. Thousands of Calkins disciples have used her curriculum “Units of Study” and others like it, which downplay phonics and emphasize a controversial method of reading instruction referred to as three-cueing. Rather than decoding words by focusing on sounds and corresponding letters, students are taught to guess words based on cues such as the first letter of a word, nearby illustrations, or context.
Despite its widespread acceptance over many years, a growing consensus has recently developed that shortcomings in Calkins’ approach are at least partially responsible for the alarming deficiencies on recent reading assessments and for the decline in literacy proficiency among thousands of American children. Emily Hanford’s investigative journalism project, entitled Sold a Story, has highlighted the shortcomings in Calkins’ approach and helped catalyze the renewed emphasis on phonics instruction. Hanford helped draw attention to the fact that thousands of students have tragically become guessers rather than readers.
Calkins’ critics suggest that is no coincidence.
Dr. Calkins now admits her approach needs “rebalancing” and has revised her curriculum to include phonics. She has stepped down from her position at Columbia, and the university renamed the center she once led, according to an announcement earlier this month.
Students will undoubtedly benefit from the renewed emphasis on phonics and science-based instruction. Given the phonetic nature of the English language, students who can’t sound out words struggle to read well, weakening the cornerstone means by which they build knowledge in every subject. The new emphasis on phonics can help prevent that from happening.
To achieve the best results, schools need to be thoughtful when it comes to implementing and augmenting the reformed curriculum, selecting who will teach the material, and partnering with parents.
As a starting point, American educators should learn from Britain’s recent experience, which serves as a cautionary tale about the consequences of taking phonics reforms too far. A decade of overcorrection that neglected the contextualized teaching of reading appears to have lowered test scores and stunted the intellectual development of thousands of students.
U.S. schools can avoid such mistakes by instead connecting science-based instruction with rich content and language arts education. Students who can not only decode words but experience language in the context of broad, engaging, and valuable content build a storehouse of knowledge that bolsters essential comprehension skills. A recent University of Virginia study confirmed what education theorist E.D. Hirsch espoused for years: background knowledge is the key to language comprehension.
In addition to avoiding the error of consuming too much instructional time teaching phonics in isolation, it’s worth remembering that a curriculum cannot teach itself. The quality of the educator matters most to student success. One has to wonder why so many teachers either didn’t notice the Calkins-style curricula was failing, misinterpreted the failure, or ignored the failure altogether.
“It’s heartbreaking to realize that I never taught many of my former students to read,” shared a teacher who spent eight years as a reading instructor in the Philadelphia area.
Other teachers knew they were ill-equipped and did little about it.
“I took a phonics course. That was about it. I didn’t really have any preparation beyond that for teaching reading,” said an Idaho teacher who has taught Kindergarten through 2nd grade for 20 years. “I kept chugging along using the district-provided curriculum, trying to find my way… I never learned about the syllable types,” she said. “I didn’t get an understanding of all the phonics rules.”
Evidently this teacher – in her 20 years of teaching – never considered getting a book on teaching phonics at the library, conducting a 30-second Google search to obtain the phonics “rules”, or questioning methods and asking for help.
How many students paid the price?
If any current teachers find themselves in a similar situation, here’s a primer featuring phonics rules, the 44 sounds in the English language, and steps for teaching, published by the National Right to Read Foundation.
Hopefully, with wise reforms, we can eventually improve overall teacher quality. But even the best teachers need support when one considers large class sizes and the need to provide students personalized attention.
Creating K-3 classroom reading teams of at least three professionals can help to provide more instructional bandwidth and expertise. These teams should include a highly qualified classroom teacher, a teaching assistant, and a reading specialist. Teams of this sort could help prevent the “pedagogical blindness” that has resulted in the harm of so many American children. Teams can share strategies and more effectively identify struggling students and ways to help them.
We also have a responsibility to help repair the damage and fill the gaps in the educational lives of older students. We should provide age-appropriate, sequential phonics instruction in the form of cohort workshops and concentrated tutoring. The instruction should protect the dignity of students who may feel embarrassed about being behind.
Finally, we need to develop new types of teacher-parent reading partnerships grounded in greater cooperation and commitment. Such partnerships would supplement in-school instruction and equip parents to teach phonics and reading at home with curated materials such as flashcards and selected books. Parents and teachers would work together to formulate and design individualized reading plans, progress calendars, and practices for developing strong reading habits.
Schools could also require periodic reading consultations giving each student the opportunity to briefly read aloud and discuss content in the presence of both parents and the teacher. These short meetings would reveal progress and bring problems to light while strengthening relationships.
Parents who aren’t already reading aloud with their children for at least 20 to 30 minutes each day would be encouraged to adopt that invaluable practice.
To be sure, such plans would require a hard look at allocations of time, effort, and money. But the devastating costs of illiteracy far outweigh the costs of combating it. Communities will need to decide what’s most important to them.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a turn to phonics instruction as a panacea for the ongoing literacy crisis in America’s schools. We can and should learn from those experiences.
The renewed emphasis on phonics appears to already be helping. But if the phonics renaissance doesn’t also incorporate contextualized reading and serious changes to how educators and parents support students and one another, the results may disappoint. If we are not careful, we will likely fail to raise and empower the literate and thinking citizens a democracy requires.
Until the next post,
Antonette