"But there’s something else they could easily do: ground reading test passages in the content specified by their social studies and science standards."
This is an interesting idea. My teacher training to become a high school English teacher included a course called "Reading in the Content Areas". Once I started teaching, I joined my fellow English teachers in bemoaning the fact that reading and writing were 'assigned' but not 'taught' in the content areas. This is the type of integration we need at all grade levels to reinforce best teaching practices throughout the curriculum. Thanks for such a comprehensive piece.
Year 42 in education for me, the past 32 in NC. The past four years I have been an elementary school librarian (best job yet); however prior to that I have been a special education teacher (K - 12), gen ed teacher for K-2 and 4-5, and a literacy coach. I have watched so many teaching fads come and go , usually based on poor curriculum that school districts purchase for way too much money. The past ten years in particular, I tried to argue that standards based testing and teaching was hurting children and teachers. Teachers stopped teaching content. They stopped teaching, period. They were told to teach using passages that supposedly taught students a standard. Then they were told to follow the curriculum to a tee, whether or not their students were learning the content or not. They stopped reading entire books to their classes. No time for read alouds because they didn't cover a standard. Student stamina decreased. Student motivation and interest in reading decreased. It all shows up in test scores, partly due to the lack of quality of the actual tests, but also because our students don't stand a chance if their teachers are not teaching, and their school systems buy into standards and poor quality curriculum programs. I love teaching and I am good at it, but younger/newer teachers are not being taught the art of teaching, so their joy decreases, which trickles down to students. I'm not sure how to get our country out of this mess, but I hope you continue to expose the facts about the state of education in our country. Maybe one day someone who has the power to make changes will listen. I have been waiting for 42 years, but I still have hope because I see children who want to learn every single day in our Title I, 99% Black and brown school. Our job is to teach them to think and to love learning.
For the math NAEP decline, my guess is the rise of the Illustrative Mathematics curriculum. It is the worst math curriculum that I have ever seen. My daughter’s former school district forced it on all 6-8th grade students starting in 2018, and it became quite prominent across the country, bolstered by the rigged EdReports ratings.
Those 6th grade students then experienced 6 years of such non-education until they were sampled in 2024 for the NAEP.
I think you need to remember that prior to the earliest pre-version of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in the 1970's we did not allow children with disabilities in schools. So they were not tested. In addition, there was no requirement for kids with learning disabilities to be taught in public schools. So they dropped out and were never tested. As those children finally got access to schooling they also started taking national tests. BUT since special education in the US is a farce those kids did not have a chance of scoring well. This will bring down the average scores.
All across this country major national newspapers (Wall St. Journal, Houston Chronicle, San Diego Times, LA Times and many more) have done in depth investigative reporting on the pervasive resistance of states and districts to real education of those with learning disabilities. These kids have normal to high IQ and can do well with the proper educational techniques. Kids with learning disabilities make up 30% of the average classroom. Yet nation wide only 13-15% of kids get special education and that includes all types of disability.
You want to raise national scores? A real commitment without deflection, gaslighting, denial of services, might get us closer. Early screening for all learning disabilities. Early intervention without a fight. Teachers who have been trained in the full breadth of the different kinds of brains in their classrooms. Teachers who know how to teach all their students not just 2/3 of the class. Up grade teacher training then let them teach.
The good news is that teaching approaches that are grounded in cognitive science generally work very well for students with learning disabilities, as well as for other students. E.g., a calm, orderly environment; explicit, interactive instruction; and lots of guided practice in complex skills. If all teachers were able to get training in those techniques, I think we would see fewer students diagnosed with learning disabilities.
I agree that teaching with cognitive science and explicit instruction will reach far, far more of the varied brains in each classroom. However, if a child looks at one pile of 5 candies beside another with 10 and can't tell which has more then you're looking at dyscalculia that is going to need knowledgeable intervention. The same is true for the many different kinds of dyslexia. You need to know that child's specific challenges or the random dyslexia curriculum you got off the shelf may not work. We need to both raise the bar on teachers, screen early, intervene early, and assess accurately. Otherwise we just feed the school to prison pipeline with poor kids while the better off families pay for what should be a free public education.
I've been a private dyslexia tutor since 2013 because the public school failed to teach my son how to read. My oldest and youngest children are not dyslexic and learned to read even with what I now know to be substandard literacy instruction.
I live in an area with well-funded public schools. I don't believe the public schools will ever effectively remediate dyslexia because the majority of dyslexics need one-to-one instruction.
In Finland they screen and intervene early for all kids. You do not need an official diagnosis for intervention. They have one of the highest literacy rates in the world. It can be done. But we need to believe a that all "children should have a good education regardless of the circumstances of their birth." We need to stop providing "FAPE." And instead have the goal to nurture each individual child's potential. We have to stop barking up the tree of accountability and instead grow the tree of nurturing a child's love of learning...and all that entails.
Branding 30% as learning disabled and therefore unsuited to the traditional classroom strategies seems like a way to brush aside the hard cases, something that really isn't allowed in most professional disciplines. If teacher knowledge is lacking, as you suggest, maybe those struggling should seek it out on their own.
I propose the problem isn’t “phones.” The problem is the flawed science of reading. Tierney and Pearson in a 2024 study comparing popular SoR “headlines” with actual findings from the National Reading Panel’s 450-page Report of the Subcommittees, as well as more recent scientific findings (the NRP’s work—the basis of SoR—is 25 years old!) identifies both misinterpretations and omissions.
Tierney and Pearson also warn that SoR only looked at popular research to arrive at its conclusions. Entire areas known to be associated with reading development were ignored.
That said, for the past eight years I’ve been using methods that reject SoR with students of all ages—5 through adult. My students only need to possess immediate recall of the sounds made by the 15 stable consonants before we jump into stories and books with highly structured methods geared to “process” learning. (I invite you to observe the methods in use online with my newest 5-year-old student—my youngest and final grandson! His older brothers are academic all-stars because they learned to read before they started public school.)
I NEVER ask students to “decode” a single word. Instead, I coach them to use the stable phonetic information strategically as they construct a meaningful message from the print. The task is more like fun deciphering than laborious decoding—with the benefit being literal comprehension rather than single-word naming. It is not “whole language.” It is procedural learning, which compels the student to figure out how to integrate multiple forms of knowledge spontaneously.
My 5-year-olds typically become proficient readers with 60 to 70 hours of tutoring.
This isn’t a sales pitch. My plate is full for this school year. It is a plea to start investigating alternative methods that are backed by data. The program I use has reams of pre-/post- test data compiled and submitted by schools—before SoR zealots killed the successful classroom programs for rejecting over-emphasis on phonics and decoding. Education Northwest completed an independent study that produced remarkable effect sizes in a single semester.
Do reading and math scores matter? Are employers finding employees less effective due to lower test scores? How about colleges? Are college entrant less able to do college work? European countries don’t use grade by grade tests, usually an exit exam, are they finding lower scores on exit exams?
I can't answer all of those questions, but there is evidence that SAT and ACT scores are pretty accurate predictors of college performance, especially when combined with grades. I'm not opposed to testing per se, as I say in the post. But we shouldn't be pretending that reading comprehension tests are measuring abstract reading comprehension skills. As cognitive scientist Dan Willingham has observed, they're really knowledge tests in disguise.
Thanks for your comment, as I tried to say, test scores are predictors of ??, the best predictor, parental income and education, we have to include economists in the discussion, for example recent Nobel Prize winner Claudia Golden, we mired in the test score silo and blaming cell phones is futile, end users, employers should be part of the debate, we might be at the cusp of transactional change (or not😧)
You directly state that students need a knowledge building curriculum to widen their understanding of topics. These curriculums are built on text excerpts. No learner in a knowledge building curriculum receives full text as stated in the last paragraphs in this post. Meaning, no child is reading a compete book.
To now intimate a complete resigned of a book when advocating for knowledge building curricula is disingenuous. For example, your books mention CKLA, Wit and Wisdom, and Core Knowledge. None of these incorporate full books are core reading.
The theory you posit for knowledge building is sound but adding full book reading when the curricula you espouse do not offer this as core reading is misleading.
Are you advocating for knowledge building from a premade designed curricula like CKLA or Wit Widom or Cote Knowledge, or, based on recent NAEP results and other comments changing your perspective?
In fact, to set the record straight, knowledge-building curricula are NOT built on excerpts. Wit & Wisdom includes LOTS of whole books, from K to 8. E.g., The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind in 1st grade, The Keeping Quilt in 3rd, The Phantom Tollbooth in 5th. Anyone who is interested can find more information about the books in the curriculum here: https://knowledgematterscampaign.org/curriculum/wit-and-wisdom/.
All of the curricula identified as knowledge-building by the Knowledge Mattters Campaign include whole texts, and one of them -- Bookworms -- has students read 265 full books as part of the curriculum by 5th grade. You can find details about the whole books in Bookworms and other knowledge-building curricula, including CKLA, here: https://knowledgematterscampaign.org/curriculum-directory/.
CKLA and Core Knowledge are basically the same thing. That curriculum does include whole books (trade books) beginning in third grade. Before that, students read decodables and listen to read-alouds of texts that were written specifically for the curriculum.
That may be what you're thinking of when you say "These curriculums are built on text excerpts." But the texts in CKLA are NOT excerpts. They are daily installments of complete stories or texts that often continue to be read aloud for several weeks. Some are informational, some are historical fiction, some are fairy tales or tall tales. So students aren't getting just a paragraph or two or a single chapter in an effort to teach abstract comprehension skills. They're getting complete texts that, from what I've seen and heard, they usually find quite engaging.
I looked through the freely available core knowledge resources online.
As far as whole grade books, they are few and far between. Grade 4 has one and it's abridged.
Grade 5 has one and then another abridged one. The last unit is a novel study but it's not planned like the other units... I'm not sure if it's really used by schools as it seems pretty light on guidance and not very CKLA.
They do have texts that are made before the curriculum, but I don't think that's what we are talking about when we refer to whole books.
I haven't had a chance to look through all the CKLA resources to determine how many whole books are included. It's true, as I said in my previous comments, that the curriculum doesn't rely on trade books to the same extent that other knowledge-building curricula do, especially in the lower grades (although the curriculum lists trade books that can be read to supplement the core curriculum texts). The core texts are written specifically for the curriculum (I assume that's what you mean when you say they are "made before the curriculum").
Personally, I'd love to see more whole books included in CKLA. But the reason they use bespoke texts is that it makes it easier to "spiral" the knowledge-building process--i.e., to bring back the same concepts and vocabulary throughout the school year and across grade levels. That's a big benefit in terms of knowledge-building, but it's a trade-off in terms of being able to use trade or "authentic" books.
But I repeat, the bespoke texts in CKLA are not the same thing as using excerpts as a vehicle for teaching skills. The fact that part of a text is read one day and part the next, and part the day after that -- so that the text is read over days or weeks -- doesn't make each part an "excerpt." It's more like reading a chapter book. True, these aren't books you can buy in a bookstore, but most of the texts in CKLA are at least as well-written as many that are commercially available.
Thanks for a thoughtful review of concerns and causes related to low reading scores in higher grades. There is one other potential cause which, although critically important, has been widely overlooked. That causative factor in reading skills is the level of student decontextualized language skills, the ability to communicate using just words. Frequently developed by the age of 4 or 5, this level of ability may still be absent in some high school students. As described in my Substack (Building Eager Learners While Building Oral Language) levels of these skills (for which I use the acronym OLDS for Oral Language Decontextualized Stage) can be identified, addressed, and most importantly, improved through selection of teaching methods. My own stance is that we need to know the OLDS of students when searching for the reason that readers struggle. Here’s a helpful and informative article on assessment of a related skill, academic language: Barr, C. D., Uccelli, P., & Phillips Galloway, E. (2019). Specifying the academic language skills that support text understanding in the middle grades: The design and validation of the Core Academic Language Skills construct and instrument. Language Learning, 69(4), 978–1021.
"But there’s something else they could easily do: ground reading test passages in the content specified by their social studies and science standards."
This is an interesting idea. My teacher training to become a high school English teacher included a course called "Reading in the Content Areas". Once I started teaching, I joined my fellow English teachers in bemoaning the fact that reading and writing were 'assigned' but not 'taught' in the content areas. This is the type of integration we need at all grade levels to reinforce best teaching practices throughout the curriculum. Thanks for such a comprehensive piece.
Year 42 in education for me, the past 32 in NC. The past four years I have been an elementary school librarian (best job yet); however prior to that I have been a special education teacher (K - 12), gen ed teacher for K-2 and 4-5, and a literacy coach. I have watched so many teaching fads come and go , usually based on poor curriculum that school districts purchase for way too much money. The past ten years in particular, I tried to argue that standards based testing and teaching was hurting children and teachers. Teachers stopped teaching content. They stopped teaching, period. They were told to teach using passages that supposedly taught students a standard. Then they were told to follow the curriculum to a tee, whether or not their students were learning the content or not. They stopped reading entire books to their classes. No time for read alouds because they didn't cover a standard. Student stamina decreased. Student motivation and interest in reading decreased. It all shows up in test scores, partly due to the lack of quality of the actual tests, but also because our students don't stand a chance if their teachers are not teaching, and their school systems buy into standards and poor quality curriculum programs. I love teaching and I am good at it, but younger/newer teachers are not being taught the art of teaching, so their joy decreases, which trickles down to students. I'm not sure how to get our country out of this mess, but I hope you continue to expose the facts about the state of education in our country. Maybe one day someone who has the power to make changes will listen. I have been waiting for 42 years, but I still have hope because I see children who want to learn every single day in our Title I, 99% Black and brown school. Our job is to teach them to think and to love learning.
For the math NAEP decline, my guess is the rise of the Illustrative Mathematics curriculum. It is the worst math curriculum that I have ever seen. My daughter’s former school district forced it on all 6-8th grade students starting in 2018, and it became quite prominent across the country, bolstered by the rigged EdReports ratings.
Those 6th grade students then experienced 6 years of such non-education until they were sampled in 2024 for the NAEP.
I think you need to remember that prior to the earliest pre-version of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in the 1970's we did not allow children with disabilities in schools. So they were not tested. In addition, there was no requirement for kids with learning disabilities to be taught in public schools. So they dropped out and were never tested. As those children finally got access to schooling they also started taking national tests. BUT since special education in the US is a farce those kids did not have a chance of scoring well. This will bring down the average scores.
All across this country major national newspapers (Wall St. Journal, Houston Chronicle, San Diego Times, LA Times and many more) have done in depth investigative reporting on the pervasive resistance of states and districts to real education of those with learning disabilities. These kids have normal to high IQ and can do well with the proper educational techniques. Kids with learning disabilities make up 30% of the average classroom. Yet nation wide only 13-15% of kids get special education and that includes all types of disability.
You want to raise national scores? A real commitment without deflection, gaslighting, denial of services, might get us closer. Early screening for all learning disabilities. Early intervention without a fight. Teachers who have been trained in the full breadth of the different kinds of brains in their classrooms. Teachers who know how to teach all their students not just 2/3 of the class. Up grade teacher training then let them teach.
The good news is that teaching approaches that are grounded in cognitive science generally work very well for students with learning disabilities, as well as for other students. E.g., a calm, orderly environment; explicit, interactive instruction; and lots of guided practice in complex skills. If all teachers were able to get training in those techniques, I think we would see fewer students diagnosed with learning disabilities.
I agree that teaching with cognitive science and explicit instruction will reach far, far more of the varied brains in each classroom. However, if a child looks at one pile of 5 candies beside another with 10 and can't tell which has more then you're looking at dyscalculia that is going to need knowledgeable intervention. The same is true for the many different kinds of dyslexia. You need to know that child's specific challenges or the random dyslexia curriculum you got off the shelf may not work. We need to both raise the bar on teachers, screen early, intervene early, and assess accurately. Otherwise we just feed the school to prison pipeline with poor kids while the better off families pay for what should be a free public education.
I've been a private dyslexia tutor since 2013 because the public school failed to teach my son how to read. My oldest and youngest children are not dyslexic and learned to read even with what I now know to be substandard literacy instruction.
I live in an area with well-funded public schools. I don't believe the public schools will ever effectively remediate dyslexia because the majority of dyslexics need one-to-one instruction.
In Finland they screen and intervene early for all kids. You do not need an official diagnosis for intervention. They have one of the highest literacy rates in the world. It can be done. But we need to believe a that all "children should have a good education regardless of the circumstances of their birth." We need to stop providing "FAPE." And instead have the goal to nurture each individual child's potential. We have to stop barking up the tree of accountability and instead grow the tree of nurturing a child's love of learning...and all that entails.
Branding 30% as learning disabled and therefore unsuited to the traditional classroom strategies seems like a way to brush aside the hard cases, something that really isn't allowed in most professional disciplines. If teacher knowledge is lacking, as you suggest, maybe those struggling should seek it out on their own.
I propose the problem isn’t “phones.” The problem is the flawed science of reading. Tierney and Pearson in a 2024 study comparing popular SoR “headlines” with actual findings from the National Reading Panel’s 450-page Report of the Subcommittees, as well as more recent scientific findings (the NRP’s work—the basis of SoR—is 25 years old!) identifies both misinterpretations and omissions.
Tierney and Pearson also warn that SoR only looked at popular research to arrive at its conclusions. Entire areas known to be associated with reading development were ignored.
That said, for the past eight years I’ve been using methods that reject SoR with students of all ages—5 through adult. My students only need to possess immediate recall of the sounds made by the 15 stable consonants before we jump into stories and books with highly structured methods geared to “process” learning. (I invite you to observe the methods in use online with my newest 5-year-old student—my youngest and final grandson! His older brothers are academic all-stars because they learned to read before they started public school.)
I NEVER ask students to “decode” a single word. Instead, I coach them to use the stable phonetic information strategically as they construct a meaningful message from the print. The task is more like fun deciphering than laborious decoding—with the benefit being literal comprehension rather than single-word naming. It is not “whole language.” It is procedural learning, which compels the student to figure out how to integrate multiple forms of knowledge spontaneously.
My 5-year-olds typically become proficient readers with 60 to 70 hours of tutoring.
This isn’t a sales pitch. My plate is full for this school year. It is a plea to start investigating alternative methods that are backed by data. The program I use has reams of pre-/post- test data compiled and submitted by schools—before SoR zealots killed the successful classroom programs for rejecting over-emphasis on phonics and decoding. Education Northwest completed an independent study that produced remarkable effect sizes in a single semester.
You might like this: https://substack.com/@nealshultz1/note/p-174332584?r=k7ywv&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web
Do reading and math scores matter? Are employers finding employees less effective due to lower test scores? How about colleges? Are college entrant less able to do college work? European countries don’t use grade by grade tests, usually an exit exam, are they finding lower scores on exit exams?
We are test obsessed?
I can't answer all of those questions, but there is evidence that SAT and ACT scores are pretty accurate predictors of college performance, especially when combined with grades. I'm not opposed to testing per se, as I say in the post. But we shouldn't be pretending that reading comprehension tests are measuring abstract reading comprehension skills. As cognitive scientist Dan Willingham has observed, they're really knowledge tests in disguise.
Thanks for your comment, as I tried to say, test scores are predictors of ??, the best predictor, parental income and education, we have to include economists in the discussion, for example recent Nobel Prize winner Claudia Golden, we mired in the test score silo and blaming cell phones is futile, end users, employers should be part of the debate, we might be at the cusp of transactional change (or not😧)
You directly state that students need a knowledge building curriculum to widen their understanding of topics. These curriculums are built on text excerpts. No learner in a knowledge building curriculum receives full text as stated in the last paragraphs in this post. Meaning, no child is reading a compete book.
To now intimate a complete resigned of a book when advocating for knowledge building curricula is disingenuous. For example, your books mention CKLA, Wit and Wisdom, and Core Knowledge. None of these incorporate full books are core reading.
The theory you posit for knowledge building is sound but adding full book reading when the curricula you espouse do not offer this as core reading is misleading.
Are you advocating for knowledge building from a premade designed curricula like CKLA or Wit Widom or Cote Knowledge, or, based on recent NAEP results and other comments changing your perspective?
In fact, to set the record straight, knowledge-building curricula are NOT built on excerpts. Wit & Wisdom includes LOTS of whole books, from K to 8. E.g., The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind in 1st grade, The Keeping Quilt in 3rd, The Phantom Tollbooth in 5th. Anyone who is interested can find more information about the books in the curriculum here: https://knowledgematterscampaign.org/curriculum/wit-and-wisdom/.
All of the curricula identified as knowledge-building by the Knowledge Mattters Campaign include whole texts, and one of them -- Bookworms -- has students read 265 full books as part of the curriculum by 5th grade. You can find details about the whole books in Bookworms and other knowledge-building curricula, including CKLA, here: https://knowledgematterscampaign.org/curriculum-directory/.
CKLA and Core Knowledge are basically the same thing. That curriculum does include whole books (trade books) beginning in third grade. Before that, students read decodables and listen to read-alouds of texts that were written specifically for the curriculum.
That may be what you're thinking of when you say "These curriculums are built on text excerpts." But the texts in CKLA are NOT excerpts. They are daily installments of complete stories or texts that often continue to be read aloud for several weeks. Some are informational, some are historical fiction, some are fairy tales or tall tales. So students aren't getting just a paragraph or two or a single chapter in an effort to teach abstract comprehension skills. They're getting complete texts that, from what I've seen and heard, they usually find quite engaging.
I looked through the freely available core knowledge resources online.
As far as whole grade books, they are few and far between. Grade 4 has one and it's abridged.
Grade 5 has one and then another abridged one. The last unit is a novel study but it's not planned like the other units... I'm not sure if it's really used by schools as it seems pretty light on guidance and not very CKLA.
They do have texts that are made before the curriculum, but I don't think that's what we are talking about when we refer to whole books.
I haven't had a chance to look through all the CKLA resources to determine how many whole books are included. It's true, as I said in my previous comments, that the curriculum doesn't rely on trade books to the same extent that other knowledge-building curricula do, especially in the lower grades (although the curriculum lists trade books that can be read to supplement the core curriculum texts). The core texts are written specifically for the curriculum (I assume that's what you mean when you say they are "made before the curriculum").
Personally, I'd love to see more whole books included in CKLA. But the reason they use bespoke texts is that it makes it easier to "spiral" the knowledge-building process--i.e., to bring back the same concepts and vocabulary throughout the school year and across grade levels. That's a big benefit in terms of knowledge-building, but it's a trade-off in terms of being able to use trade or "authentic" books.
But I repeat, the bespoke texts in CKLA are not the same thing as using excerpts as a vehicle for teaching skills. The fact that part of a text is read one day and part the next, and part the day after that -- so that the text is read over days or weeks -- doesn't make each part an "excerpt." It's more like reading a chapter book. True, these aren't books you can buy in a bookstore, but most of the texts in CKLA are at least as well-written as many that are commercially available.
Thanks for a thoughtful review of concerns and causes related to low reading scores in higher grades. There is one other potential cause which, although critically important, has been widely overlooked. That causative factor in reading skills is the level of student decontextualized language skills, the ability to communicate using just words. Frequently developed by the age of 4 or 5, this level of ability may still be absent in some high school students. As described in my Substack (Building Eager Learners While Building Oral Language) levels of these skills (for which I use the acronym OLDS for Oral Language Decontextualized Stage) can be identified, addressed, and most importantly, improved through selection of teaching methods. My own stance is that we need to know the OLDS of students when searching for the reason that readers struggle. Here’s a helpful and informative article on assessment of a related skill, academic language: Barr, C. D., Uccelli, P., & Phillips Galloway, E. (2019). Specifying the academic language skills that support text understanding in the middle grades: The design and validation of the Core Academic Language Skills construct and instrument. Language Learning, 69(4), 978–1021.