Anyone who doesn't think we have a reading crisis must not have much contact with ordinary Americans. We even have a landscaper (yes, an American who graduated from a US high school) who is illiterate. We can debate the validity of different assessment testing but the problem is in front of our eyes on a daily basis. Also, I wonder if the reading problem has become generational. If the parents can't really read, do they even know or understand any reading problems their children might have? The problem may well be exponential.
The crisis narrative sells more curriculums, teacher training, and consultants though, at the expense of taxpayers. It's possible that George Carlin explained it best. The reason why Wexler et al. and the wealthy interests that back her wants to make sure teachers have no autonomy in what sort of research informs their teaching practice is because our owners don't want us to have choices, and they don't want us to be smart enough to know we're being screwed.
Excellent article! I strongly recommend that you read it from beginning to end and without skimming so you can fully comprehend its meaning…just like the “students” it’s referring to. Thank you Natalie.
But we’ve always had a reading crisis. NAEP scores have always been low and had been slowly improving until the pandemic. And that’s with the various instructional strategies that schools have yo-yoed over those 50 years.
And we’ve always had people who bring up the reading crisis to try to sell books and curriculum. SOR has been wildly successful at that. We will see how much that improves student achievement. I think there will be a lot of celebratory articles about improvements on specific measures in early grades. But I’m less optimistic about big improvements in older grades. I hope I’m wrong.
And I think that has a lot more to do with the society (post-literate?) that we live in rather than just instruction. I always find it ironic that Hanford’s “Sold a Story”—the Big Bang of SOR—came out as a podcast. If it were just another print article in The Atlantic, I don’t think it would have had the same effect.
Exactly. This sor stamp is the new Common core stamp and it is selling nonsense like hotcakes. Who stands to profit is always the question and as per usual, teachers are the punching bag. This argument has been going in since I stepped into the classroom in 1987. Programs do not teach kids to read; teachers, with a skill set and knowledge of many strategies and an understanding that kids learn differently, teach kids to read. Thank you Dr. Ross, Dr. Bondy, Dr. Andrews, Dr. Lamme, etc. at UFProTeach for that. And we have pushed down the curriculum expecting five year olds to read when 30 years ago it was expected by end of first to be on their way. We are putting undue pressure on little people. Pssst-degreed early childhood educators know this. All in pursuit of 3rd grade test scores. Phonics was never pushed out unless you were a teacher who needed a scripted curriculum and followed your basal/program with fidelity. Exactly what I am seeing now! Give me the magic program! Teaching kids to read is complex and requires deep knowledge of all the skills good readers need. And for the love of god, let children write their own stories and read to them daily, multiple times. The agenda is to stop supporting non educators who have no idea what they are talking about, but make lots of green doing it. It is like arm chair drs on the internet telling me that seed oils and vaccines are bad so try my “google researched” knowledge and you too will be healthy. Thank you, I like my degreed drs and degreed educators who did studying and do the work. And phonics has never been the be all end all of reading. But hey, got lots of op-eds in my scrapbook from Gainesville Sun in the 90s telling teachers it was Biblical and God’s way!
We should take a moment to consider what it means to "read on grade (or age) level".
Based on the accepted definition of average, an average 3rd grader and an average 5th grader could have the same score on a standardized reading test. So, what grade level would that be, 3rd, 4th, or 5th!? There is a lot of overlap! (See the graph on this page: https://www.lexercise.com/blog/reading-grade-level. )
A big part of the problem is that a grade-level (or age-level) approach incorrectly implies that reading skills can be measured independently of knowledge of the reading selection's topic. As you have pointed out for years, Natalie, this doesn't make sense. Yet, the world continues to act as if there is such a thing as "grade-level reading".
And, yes, Linda! A student's fluency (i.e., word reading accuracy + speed) can be a very effective measure of reading mastery IF **the topic of the reading material is familiar**. However, topic familiarity is challenging to determine for an individual student.
A gamified sentence reading efficiency assessment piloted by Yeatman et al. (2024) suggests a way forward, using simple sentences that are unambiguously true or false and basic vocabulary, syntax, and background knowledge. We used this concept to build a reading comprehension progress mastery assessment game: Factron. It is working beautifully!
We see students who master the decoding and even the spelling of covered word structure concepts, but who struggle with accurate and fluent sentence reading. The combination of tracking mastery in three dimensions (decoding, spelling, and comprehension) is actionable and powerful.
You're right that any of these reading levels -- grade, age, or individual -- are only approximate. Same with the levels assigned to reading materials. None of them take into account the topic and the individual reader's knowledge of that topic. But I decided not to get into that because the post was already pretty long without it!
No reading crisis? As a retired English prof, I long ago learned that asking students to read something aloud in class can be a painful business for everyone in the room. I don’t mean calling on people and catching them unawares — I mean asking a student to read, say, a short passage (in a novel, story, essay, whatever) that supported what they were just talking about. When I found myself having to feed students a word here, and word there, I knew it was time to give up on asking students to read aloud (in at least in many circumstances).
I think that the crisis in the humanities is really about the crisis in reading.
I'm so tired of hearing people address the embarrassing lack of reading proficiency in the US with generalizations and broad brushstrokes like teaching phonics for 90 minutes because "phonics works". The fact is that there are a lot of educated folks that know how to teach reading well but there are so many strings attached within our government (state, federal and local) and generally the wrong (uneducated as far as teaching reading) people are calling the shots.
I just read an article in a local AZ paper that talked about how low our reading scores are and mostly discussed the plan to add to the approximately 40 reading specialists to increase their numbers to 150 or more. That's all well and good but will they be permitted to use their expertise and will they and the teachers be given time together for training and support. Will they have materials and will they be able to follow best practices? Or will someone without credentials to do so be making these decisions for them?
Ugh Thomas is the worst. I looked into him a few years ago after someone I know cited his work. From what I can tell, he supports the status quo while cloaking himself in a fake progressive cape.
Parents certainly CAN teach their kids to read -- my mother taught me to read before I started kindergarten. But not all children are lucky enough to have parents with the time and ability to do that, and schools can and should enable all children to learn to read.
agreed to all that. But it amazes me the number of engaged and involved parents that don't take this easy step, and think the school will just take care of it.
Many school districts, especially those using Balanced Literacy and Whole Language curricula tell parents not to coach or teach their kids, but just listen to them practicing reading and encourage them. They fear if the parents learned to read using a different process from what the teachers say in class, it will confuse the students!
Sure because balanced literacy is a bunch of BS. Sound out the words.
Not to mention I maintain that learning to read is really best done one on one. You can let the kid struggle through it and provide assistance when sounding out.
Also, I found the teach your kid to read in 100 easy lessons book to be amazing at the start of the process.
Here is an entire web site dedicated to giving parents the tools they need. Simply reading books to children and pointing things out to them isn't going to do it. "My Child Will Read": http://mychildwillread.org/
Sorry, but when you said "change up the book" I presumed that you were inferring that teaching reading consisted of nothing more than reading books to kids. I see now that you are a fan of "Teach Your Child". Please see my other posts here.
Anyone who doesn't think we have a reading crisis must not have much contact with ordinary Americans. We even have a landscaper (yes, an American who graduated from a US high school) who is illiterate. We can debate the validity of different assessment testing but the problem is in front of our eyes on a daily basis. Also, I wonder if the reading problem has become generational. If the parents can't really read, do they even know or understand any reading problems their children might have? The problem may well be exponential.
It's not a crisis. It's a SNAFU.
The crisis narrative sells more curriculums, teacher training, and consultants though, at the expense of taxpayers. It's possible that George Carlin explained it best. The reason why Wexler et al. and the wealthy interests that back her wants to make sure teachers have no autonomy in what sort of research informs their teaching practice is because our owners don't want us to have choices, and they don't want us to be smart enough to know we're being screwed.
Excellent article! I strongly recommend that you read it from beginning to end and without skimming so you can fully comprehend its meaning…just like the “students” it’s referring to. Thank you Natalie.
"Maybe he has an unspoken agenda?" No maybe about it! I wrote about Thomas and other SOR detractors in The Science of Reading: A Call to Action or a Cash Cow? (https://harriettjanetos.substack.com/p/the-science-of-reading-a-call-to?r=5spuf). Thank you for bringing this important topic to widespread attention!
What wealthy interests do you think are backing P. L. Thomas?
What wealthy interests do you think bankroll the education reform industry in the U.S.?
What wealthy interests do you think bankroll the Knowledge Matters Campaign?
But we’ve always had a reading crisis. NAEP scores have always been low and had been slowly improving until the pandemic. And that’s with the various instructional strategies that schools have yo-yoed over those 50 years.
And we’ve always had people who bring up the reading crisis to try to sell books and curriculum. SOR has been wildly successful at that. We will see how much that improves student achievement. I think there will be a lot of celebratory articles about improvements on specific measures in early grades. But I’m less optimistic about big improvements in older grades. I hope I’m wrong.
And I think that has a lot more to do with the society (post-literate?) that we live in rather than just instruction. I always find it ironic that Hanford’s “Sold a Story”—the Big Bang of SOR—came out as a podcast. If it were just another print article in The Atlantic, I don’t think it would have had the same effect.
Actually, NAEP reading scores have been essentially stagnant since 1998 -- and they started declining BEFORE the pandemic.
Exactly. This sor stamp is the new Common core stamp and it is selling nonsense like hotcakes. Who stands to profit is always the question and as per usual, teachers are the punching bag. This argument has been going in since I stepped into the classroom in 1987. Programs do not teach kids to read; teachers, with a skill set and knowledge of many strategies and an understanding that kids learn differently, teach kids to read. Thank you Dr. Ross, Dr. Bondy, Dr. Andrews, Dr. Lamme, etc. at UFProTeach for that. And we have pushed down the curriculum expecting five year olds to read when 30 years ago it was expected by end of first to be on their way. We are putting undue pressure on little people. Pssst-degreed early childhood educators know this. All in pursuit of 3rd grade test scores. Phonics was never pushed out unless you were a teacher who needed a scripted curriculum and followed your basal/program with fidelity. Exactly what I am seeing now! Give me the magic program! Teaching kids to read is complex and requires deep knowledge of all the skills good readers need. And for the love of god, let children write their own stories and read to them daily, multiple times. The agenda is to stop supporting non educators who have no idea what they are talking about, but make lots of green doing it. It is like arm chair drs on the internet telling me that seed oils and vaccines are bad so try my “google researched” knowledge and you too will be healthy. Thank you, I like my degreed drs and degreed educators who did studying and do the work. And phonics has never been the be all end all of reading. But hey, got lots of op-eds in my scrapbook from Gainesville Sun in the 90s telling teachers it was Biblical and God’s way!
We should take a moment to consider what it means to "read on grade (or age) level".
Based on the accepted definition of average, an average 3rd grader and an average 5th grader could have the same score on a standardized reading test. So, what grade level would that be, 3rd, 4th, or 5th!? There is a lot of overlap! (See the graph on this page: https://www.lexercise.com/blog/reading-grade-level. )
A big part of the problem is that a grade-level (or age-level) approach incorrectly implies that reading skills can be measured independently of knowledge of the reading selection's topic. As you have pointed out for years, Natalie, this doesn't make sense. Yet, the world continues to act as if there is such a thing as "grade-level reading".
Shout out to Natalie here ...there is a better way to profile reading skills. See: https://www.lexercise.com/blog/reading-skills
And, yes, Linda! A student's fluency (i.e., word reading accuracy + speed) can be a very effective measure of reading mastery IF **the topic of the reading material is familiar**. However, topic familiarity is challenging to determine for an individual student.
A gamified sentence reading efficiency assessment piloted by Yeatman et al. (2024) suggests a way forward, using simple sentences that are unambiguously true or false and basic vocabulary, syntax, and background knowledge. We used this concept to build a reading comprehension progress mastery assessment game: Factron. It is working beautifully!
We see students who master the decoding and even the spelling of covered word structure concepts, but who struggle with accurate and fluent sentence reading. The combination of tracking mastery in three dimensions (decoding, spelling, and comprehension) is actionable and powerful.
Check out a demo version of the Factron game here: https://app.lexercise.com/mylexercise/index/index/demo/rkqra24jskxjsri9?_gl=1*1e7buxr*_gcl_au*Nzk0MjU0NzIzLjE3NDk2NjgwMTg.
Thanks, Natalie, for your persistent clarity!
You're right that any of these reading levels -- grade, age, or individual -- are only approximate. Same with the levels assigned to reading materials. None of them take into account the topic and the individual reader's knowledge of that topic. But I decided not to get into that because the post was already pretty long without it!
No reading crisis? As a retired English prof, I long ago learned that asking students to read something aloud in class can be a painful business for everyone in the room. I don’t mean calling on people and catching them unawares — I mean asking a student to read, say, a short passage (in a novel, story, essay, whatever) that supported what they were just talking about. When I found myself having to feed students a word here, and word there, I knew it was time to give up on asking students to read aloud (in at least in many circumstances).
I think that the crisis in the humanities is really about the crisis in reading.
I'm so tired of hearing people address the embarrassing lack of reading proficiency in the US with generalizations and broad brushstrokes like teaching phonics for 90 minutes because "phonics works". The fact is that there are a lot of educated folks that know how to teach reading well but there are so many strings attached within our government (state, federal and local) and generally the wrong (uneducated as far as teaching reading) people are calling the shots.
I just read an article in a local AZ paper that talked about how low our reading scores are and mostly discussed the plan to add to the approximately 40 reading specialists to increase their numbers to 150 or more. That's all well and good but will they be permitted to use their expertise and will they and the teachers be given time together for training and support. Will they have materials and will they be able to follow best practices? Or will someone without credentials to do so be making these decisions for them?
Once again: this has been going on for 80 years. Anyone who still believes that this system can work is either dreaming or a shill for the system: No, we are not going to fix the public schools: https://daveziffer.substack.com/p/no-we-are-not-going-to-fix-the-public
Well done, Natalie. And he didn't even consider the separate fluency results.
Ugh Thomas is the worst. I looked into him a few years ago after someone I know cited his work. From what I can tell, he supports the status quo while cloaking himself in a fake progressive cape.
Thank you for your excellent analysis, as always, Natalie!
Learning to read should ideally be done by the parents
15 to 20 mins a night of one on one instruction is plenty.
And Yes, when teaching our kids to read, we always made sure to change up the book so they couldn't memorize them.
Parents certainly CAN teach their kids to read -- my mother taught me to read before I started kindergarten. But not all children are lucky enough to have parents with the time and ability to do that, and schools can and should enable all children to learn to read.
I wonder if the kids who learn to read from their parent/s before kindergarten are teaching their children phonics?
agreed to all that. But it amazes me the number of engaged and involved parents that don't take this easy step, and think the school will just take care of it.
Many school districts, especially those using Balanced Literacy and Whole Language curricula tell parents not to coach or teach their kids, but just listen to them practicing reading and encourage them. They fear if the parents learned to read using a different process from what the teachers say in class, it will confuse the students!
Sure because balanced literacy is a bunch of BS. Sound out the words.
Not to mention I maintain that learning to read is really best done one on one. You can let the kid struggle through it and provide assistance when sounding out.
Also, I found the teach your kid to read in 100 easy lessons book to be amazing at the start of the process.
https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Child-Read-Lessons/dp/0671631985/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3CWLTK5RH96HC&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.oyUlujdajCda0OkfFN66950v0Wr9urUsPpPaAka6WRTk5b_yYLkXr8DAuVVJP2aJYGrklk2JgiYXRLAHJEbas11f3Rqx2no5rdchruQUYKw2GNIOar4hDDZKGIOd-kBGvnPhgdydFXHMBT7mSil4M6D1tXMg6RCVcwWSTLj1vYT57WokXGdFkKvLmEDWbGt8-v7PR1aMH0hfi4w9Gsrd7jXMmYXpplVUFdyZHAyh5iA.G1lrCnXbMG4D5njnF2QloBMk-lLWwqHUWHl0yqiyBZU&dib_tag=se&keywords=teach+your+child+to+read+in+100+easy+lessons&qid=1755011245&sprefix=teach+y%2Caps%2C245&sr=8-1
Here is an entire web site dedicated to giving parents the tools they need. Simply reading books to children and pointing things out to them isn't going to do it. "My Child Will Read": http://mychildwillread.org/
I didn't say reading books to children I said teaching kids to read. IE you teach them how to sound out words.
I used to teach your kids to read in 100 easy lessons book, which is amazing
https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Child-Read-Lessons/dp/0671631985/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3CWLTK5RH96HC&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.oyUlujdajCda0OkfFN66950v0Wr9urUsPpPaAka6WRTk5b_yYLkXr8DAuVVJP2aJYGrklk2JgiYXRLAHJEbas11f3Rqx2no5rdchruQUYKw2GNIOar4hDDZKGIOd-kBGvnPhgdydFXHMBT7mSil4M6D1tXMg6RCVcwWSTLj1vYT57WokXGdFkKvLmEDWbGt8-v7PR1aMH0hfi4w9Gsrd7jXMmYXpplVUFdyZHAyh5iA.G1lrCnXbMG4D5njnF2QloBMk-lLWwqHUWHl0yqiyBZU&dib_tag=se&keywords=teach+your+child+to+read+in+100+easy+lessons&qid=1755011245&sprefix=teach+y%2Caps%2C245&sr=8-1
Sorry, but when you said "change up the book" I presumed that you were inferring that teaching reading consisted of nothing more than reading books to kids. I see now that you are a fan of "Teach Your Child". Please see my other posts here.