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FOREWORD

Enthusiasm for the science of reading, a body of research pointing to the importance of understanding letter-sound relationships as the basic building block of literacy, is exploding, upending the decades-long dominance of “whole-language” instruction and its misguided proposition that by saturating students in a literature-rich environment, most would learn to read without explicit, sequenced instruction.

Instead, years of research have shown students need to be taught five core components of literacy:
hearing and manipulating the smallest units of sound in speech; sounding out words by understanding the relationship between letters or groups of letters and their sound; reading accurately with appropriate speed and expression; language and vocabulary skills; and comprehension.

Spurred by parents, civil rights leaders, advocacy groups and the media in response to years of troublingly low scores on national reading tests and more recently extensive learning loss during the pandemic, several states, including Mississippi and Tennessee, places not known for their high-performing education systems, have made dramatic strides in introducing literacy reforms based on the science of reading. The challenge now is to translate these policy initiatives into effective classroom practices, scaling instruction based on the science of reading in the nation’s vast, decentralized system of more than 13,000 public school districts.

To that end, this FutureEd report, researched and written by Senior Fellow Lynn Olson, tells the story of how Mississippi, Tennessee and other states in the vanguard of today’s reading revolution have redesigned reading instruction and raised student achievement in thousands of public schools through bold, state- level leadership—demonstrating that with the right ingredients, change can happen in public education on a large scale, smart policy can drive higher performance, and bipartisan school reform is possible even in today’s fraught political climate.

FutureEd Policy Analyst Bella DiMarco conducted an extensive scan of states’ reading-related legislative initiatives for the project, as well as collected information from state department of education web sites, providing a detailed portrait of the reading revolution’s evolution in state capitals in recent years. We’ve compiled Bella’s research in an appendix to the report. Bella also researched and wrote the sidebar on the steps educators need to take to make reading instruction successful for English Language Learners.

Associate Director Phyllis Jordan managed the editorial process for the project and Molly Breen, Jackie Arthur and Nathalie Kirsch contributed their editorial expertise.

We are grateful to the Schusterman Family Foundation for funding the project.

Thomas Toch

Director, FutureEd

Referência: The Reading Revolution: How States are Scaling Literacy Reform. (2023). Retrieved 22 June 2023, from https://www.future-ed.org/teaching-children-to-read-one-state-at-a-time/