During my first-year of teaching, I had a baby who was always logged on and ready by 8:25 am. I would let the class in from the Zoom waiting room and there she would be, seated for transitional kindergarten, pencils and crayons to one side, papers and supplies on the other, with her mom right beside her, getting her own work done. She was incredibly bright student, with a sharp memory, wonderful sense of humour, and was easily one of the cutest kids I have ever seen in my life.
Within a few months, she was spelling, writing, and sounding out the letters in her first, middle, and last name, and all before she turned five. We still had months left in TK and I was ready to let her coast, knowing that it was the next year in school where formal reading instruction would build on the foundational academic and social skills we were learning in our classroom. But her mom had other ideas. She sent me a text message one evening in the spring semester asking if I had any resources she could use to teach her daughter how to read. She’s ready — her mom stressed to me — and she’s itching to read. Mom had been researching online and had attended district meetings for parents around literacy, and although she understood reading wasn’t a part of what we would be doing that school year, she wanted her daughter to at least start doing that work.
And I agreed. I had most of my afternoons free with distance learning and figured that instead of signing up for more virtual professional development, I could teach my student to read, pushing her growth and mine in tandem. I had worked predominantly in early childhood education by this point and so I knew little about the mechanics of reading instruction. However, I still had credential logins to the Fountas and Pinnell literacy program that I had used when I was student teaching in First Grade, and so I figured that I’d start there. With some DIY Google Slides, a lot of improvisation, and a commitment by mom to work with her before, after, and during class, my student had learned how to read by the end of the year, and I had learned how to teach reading.
65% of students in Oakland are not reading at grade-level. That means from elementary to high school, when students are taking standardised tests assessing where they land across the benchmarks necessary to graduate as proficient readers, 65% of them are not meeting the mark. This should shock and shame, and as an educator, I feel both deeply. There are too many children across the country and around the world who are being locked out of academic and professional opportunities because they cannot read in the ways that they should, and this reality haunts teachers, parents, policy makers, and students alike.
You would be hard-pressed to find a publication with an education focus or beat that has not reported extensively on the “reading wars.” The term describes the conflicts and tensions that have escalated particularly over the past three years, in which teachers, parents, administrators, policy-makers, researchers, publishers, corporations, the media and more have all come to blows in disagreement on the best way to teach kids how to read. Regardless of the fact that students and their teachers have been engaging in reading instruction for centuries, there is little consensus on what this should look like. Trends, research, and publication markets have shifted and shaped discourse on best practices, shifting from rote memorisation, to balanced literacy, to phonics-based instruction, with each methodology touting being research and science-based. And yet, too many kids are still failing to read.
Parents seeing into their children’s classrooms during the pandemic were shocked into action when they realised the ways in which reading instruction was failing. Teachers, who had been experiencing curriculum vertigo as districts bought and switched programs in cycles, raised the alarm as well. School board leaders, local officials, and elected representatives have been routinely asked what their plans are to secure the children of constituents their fundamental human right to a quality education. The reading wars rage on with no discernible end in sight, and young people suffer as the casualties. But what would it look like to meaningfully collaborate to find and enact the most effective ways to teach children how to read? Where are we falling short at the moment and how do we overcome these challenges? And what is at stake when we sit idly by, pointing our fingers and looking away?
My second year of teaching was in actuality my first in the classroom, and my goal was to expand on what was working virtually on Zoom to a full-scale approach to literacy in the classroom. I continued having my students trace their names everyday and practice spelling it as they wrote it, and pushing those who were ready to include their middle and last names and their letter sounds too. I also included worksheets that we could work on together as a class, so that they could get used to the whole group instruction and individual work expectations that would be required of them in kindergarten and beyond. But I also had them play with magnet letters that they could use to write their name, reinforcing their letter knowledge by literally holding them in their hands as was appropriate given their age.
And again, I had a student who breezed through these activities and within months, had the letter names and sounds knowledge necessary to begin learning how to read. I spoke to his parents in our first parent-teacher conference and asked if they would be okay with me pushing him, and they said that they trusted me and were fine either way. I borrowed some materials from my school’s literacy coach that they were using in the older grades and we got started, focusing predominantly on memorising sight words and blending letter sounds in short words through 1-on-1 work either with me or with the instructional aid in my room.
Almost immediately, my student was not into it. Seeing others get to play and do what he viewed as “easy” work made him feel like he was being picked on. He was also a perfectionist and whenever he forgot a sight word or could not figure out how to blend a word, he would either shut down and explode. Learning how to read, I was realising, could be a pretty fraught endeavour emotionally, impacting how students’ saw themselves in ways that I suspected would reverberate for decades to come. Determined, however, to finish what I started, we pushed and pushed, and I relied on his natural strengths around knowledge retention and implementation. And by the end of the year, we got there.
64% of students in Mississippi are reading at grade-level. Over the last ten years, the state spent $15 million a year to support literacy and implemented strategies that included universal preschool, individual reading plans for targeted students, the selective hiring of coaches to work in specific schools on evidence-based reading approaches, intense professional development, and retaining third graders who performing below testing standards. Their success illuminates the fact that effective reading instruction goes beyond a singular methodology, but requires multiple pathways that include early intervention, financial investment, and an equitable approach that focuses directly on individual schools and individual students, with the knowledge that what is done to support the communities that need it the most can be expanded to others too.
What is hindering us in this moment is our search for a silver bullet and an easy target. We are looking for story that tells us that if we just spent more money, or just followed the science, or did one last overhaul, then we could get it right. But, like with most other issues in education, it is not that simple. We fall short when we look for shortcuts and antagonise, rather than coming together as stakeholders, figuring out to prioritise funding, implement wrap-around services, and uplift and improve schools rather than grade and close them.
Literacy is not only the first step of an education, it is the first step of life. Reading can build or destroy a child’s confidence and set the pace for how they see themselves as a student and as a human being. When students fall behind in those foundational years, the additional tasks required of them, year after year, across disciplines, suddenly transform an education into a Sisyphean ordeal. Furthermore, students not only miss out on fulfilling their educational and professional ambitions, but also — important in their own way — they miss out on the magic of reading. They miss the wonder and excitement that comes from reading Harry Potter or Twilight or Captian Underpants, and all the other worlds designed for children to lose themselves in. Joy too becomes a casualty of war.
My third year of a teaching, I had a transitional kindergarten/kindergarten combination class. This time, I was tasked with teaching the majority of my students how to read by working in a team with other teachers and literacy tutors across grade levels. I had the posters and flashcards and worksheets and mini stories and my twenty-four students and I were off. Almost immediately, I saw how for most students, reading was a pretty arduous journey, one riddled with challenges and mistakes that required repetition and perseverance to overcome.
And gradually, we got there. At their own pace, students grew and blossomed and parents did what they could to support students in their work too. But for as much as I saw all that worked, I also was able to see first hand all the little ways that reading instruction could be undercut. As a teacher, I often felt undertrained and underprepared and would have loved more professional development. Thirty minutes to an hour a day of direct instruction was not enough, and at the same time, there was no other time in the day in between writing and comprehension, and math and science and more. Students might be missing from school or teachers and tutors might be missing from school and everything would be set back. Students who were multilingual and students with disabilities had no specific scaffolds and supports to meet their unique needs. For all the steps taken forward, there was more my students and I could have done, and I was left with just as much regret as I had pride.
There was one student I had who had been in my class for two years, with me in TK and then by chance again in my combination class the next year. Over those two years, I sat with her as we wrote her name and months later, she still wasn’t getting it down. She was an English Language Learner, her attendance wasn’t great, and she enjoyed school but it wasn’t her favourite. I was distracted by other students, I delegated other tutors and volunteers to work with her, and I frequently changed the activities she was engaging in during our literacy block. She graduated from kindergarten without a single lesson in reading instruction and at times my guilt felt overwhelming. Not every story in education has a happy ending, and there are millions of students denied one everyday. Admitting our shortcomings should come first. Doing better comes next.