Reading Assessments Need an Upgrade

Most reading comprehension assessments are grounded in the belief that reading is a specialized set of skills, such as finding the main idea or identifying the author’s purpose. This may be one of the ways in which the assessment cart drives the instruction horse: on state assessments, students read a random passage they’ve never encountered before (known as a cold read) and answer questions related to main idea and purpose. Sounds simple, right? Read a passage at your grade level and answer a few questions aligned to your grade level’s standards.

In school systems, we can see that these tests have driven reading instruction for quite some time. Teachers look at samples from state assessments and do everything in their power to make sure what they teach in their classroom looks as much like the state assessment as possible. And this isn’t all bad—instruction should be aligned to the expected outcome. Unfortunately, the overt focus on skills has led to a misplaced emphasis on skills-based reading lessons in which the topics of the texts being read have taken a backseat to the skills being practiced. The problem is, the topics of the reading passages heavily impact a student’s comprehension… and many educators don’t know that this is the case.

“The Baseball Study” by Recht and Leslie (1988) should be required reading on assessment of reading comprehension. The outcomes of this study tell us that a student’s prior knowledge of a topic has a greater impact on his or her ability to comprehend a text than generalized reading ability. In other words, being a “good” reader isn’t going to help you very much if you aren’t familiar with the topic you are reading about.

We know this disproportionately impacts children from lower socio-economic backgrounds. Children from homes with higher incomes tend to be exposed to a broader array of topics and knowledge through reading, discussions with parents, and family trips to places with historical significance, varying geography, or diverse cultures. These experiences begin to build a child’s web of information—a tool they’ll use to make meaning of new information as they read in class. On the other hand, a student who isn’t afforded these opportunities has the greatest need for the knowledge-building opportunities provided by his teacher and school.

In response to this research, a growing number of schools and districts have moved to adopt knowledge-building curricula. My district (Jackson-Madison County Schools, TN) made this switch two years ago; we now use two elementary ELA curricula – CKLA and EL Education – designed around many science and social studies topics, so that students learn about key topics as part of reading and writing instruction. The goal is to ensure all students build a bank of knowledge on a variety of topics in science, history, literature, and the arts, so that the knowledge gaps created by socio-economic factors are decreased over time and replaced with a more consistent knowledge base.

Currently we’re in a distance-learning era, and I must say, knowledge-building curricula “travels well;” it’s a lot easier to help students study these knowledge-rich topics with parents than it would be to coach parents on “find the main idea.” Providers of high-quality curricula, such as CKLA (Amplify), EL Education, and Wit and Wisdom (Great Minds), have stepped up to the plate to provide teachers and parents with the option to continue knowledge-building at home. And although internet access remains a barrier for many students, a district that has aligned their efforts behind a knowledge-building curriculum stands a better chance of translating high-quality materials into paper-based assignments for use at home as well.

But how does this translate to reading tests? Does implementing a knowledge-building curriculum mean reading scores will go up this year? Or the next?

Although it is possible for implementation of a knowledge-building curriculum to lead to early gains in reading, I’m concerned that district efforts to improve reading in this way will be declared a failure if scores don’t rise quickly enough. (My district has seen positive indicators in the first two years, including much higher scores on phonemic awareness and nearly a 5% gain in 3rd grade reading proficiency… but I expect that significant gains might take time, as I’ve written previously.) As educators, we are quick to discard initiatives that don’t produce results immediately, even when we know deep down it isn’t that simple.

Also, measuring progress when implementing knowledge-based curricula is complicated by the aforementioned structure of traditional reading assessments. Reading passages on assessments are generally selected based on qualitative and quantitative complexity, but with little thought to the topics of the passages. Since most districts don’t share a common curriculum, why worry about the topics of the passages?

For assessments to truly measure the progress of students in the first few years of a knowledge-based curriculum, the texts included on tests need to be on similar topics as those that were read during the school year. For example, our 5th grade students read about biodiversity in the rainforest, Jackie Robinson and the Civil Rights Movement, and the impact of natural disasters. Despite how much a student learns on these topics, if he or she has general knowledge gaps and the test includes an anchor text on something foreign to the student, the student most likely won’t perform very well. In this event, do the test results tell us anything about how much progress the student made this year, or how good of a reader they are? Or did it just confirm that significant knowledge gaps still exist?

In an effort to better gauge student progress in a knowledge-based curriculum, Louisiana has moved down a path to assess students in reading on the topics covered in their grade’s reading curriculum. The state can do this due to the tremendous efforts put in to implementing the Louisiana Guidebooks, a statewide English/language arts curriculum rolled out in 2014. Although the initial results of this pilot are still pending, the research suggests this is a promising practice. Limiting passages on reading assessments to those topics covered within the reading curriculum controls, to some degree, for the variability in prior knowledge amongst students. This, in turn, should remove the pre-existing bias towards middle and upper income students present with most current reading assessments. Only by controlling for the impact of prior knowledge will we ever truly be able to measure the progress of students in the first few years of experiencing a knowledge-based curriculum. This will help us as a profession to resist the urge to switch tracks in a year or two when we don’t see the dramatic gains we so desire. Then, in theory, after five years or so of students matriculating through a range of topics in successive grades, the variability of scores on cold read assessments should decrease.

As a profession, our collective handwringing over reading scores has gone on for a long time. And truthfully, we know too much about how students learn to read for it to go on much longer. The question is, will we know when we are on the right track if we aren’t looking for progress in the right places?

– Jared Myracle


Curriculum Notes

If you’d like to speak with me about the specific curricula used in my district, they are:

K–2 ELA:Core Knowledge Language Arts (all-green on EdReports, Tier 1 on Louisiana Believes)

3–5 ELA:EL Education Language Arts (all-green on EdReports, Tier 1 on Louisiana Believes)

6-12 ELA: LearnZillion Louisiana Guidebooks (Tier 1 on Louisiana Believesin grades 6–8)

K–12 Math: Eureka Math (all green on EdReportsin grades K–5, Tier 1 on Louisiana Believesin K–12)

A District Leader’s Education in Early Reading

This piece – authored by Jared Myracle – was originally published in the February 2020 edition of Educational Leadership and can be viewed online in that format. It has been reposted with permission from ASCD.

Why I decided our district needed to move in a new direction.

This past year has seen a significant uptick in discussion about reading instruction in schools. Despite reforms to standards, teacher evaluation, and a push for more technology in classrooms, reading scores on the National Assessment for Educational Progress—among other worrisome literacy indicators—have declined slightly. As the national conversation grows, many school and district leaders are trying to move quickly up the learning curve on the question of how kids actually learn to read proficiently—and how best to support the process in their schools.

I was a high school history teacher, so my training and classroom experience were not grounded in helping children learn to read. My time as a middle school and high school administrator did little to further my knowledge. At the same time, those experiences gave me a powerful window into the consequences of poor early reading instruction and the challenges students face when their literacy skills are below grade level.

When I became a district chief academic officer and began looking into the research on reading, I found, to my surprise, that there was a fair amount of consensus among experts on how kids learn to read. A number of interlocking approaches are consistently recommended. While you might see debate about implementation issues, the big picture on developing proficient readers is pretty clear from the research I was seeing.

Here are the common refrains I found:

  • Daily systematic phonics instruction in early elementary grades is essential and is supported by overwhelming evidence from the National Reading Panel and subsequent studies. Experts typically recommend 30 to 60 minutes of explicit phonics instruction daily, followed by opportunities for practice and reinforcement (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000).
  • Assuming basic proficiency in decoding, students’ knowledge of a topic greatly influences how well they can read and comprehend text about that topic. Recht and Leslie’s famous “Baseball Study” (1988)—finding that students’ prior knowledge of baseball significantly determined their understanding of a passage about the sport—memorably demonstrates this and reinforces the need for curricula to begin building knowledge on a variety of topics found in literature, science, and social studies in early elementary grades. E.D. Hirsch Jr.’s Why Knowledge Matters (Harvard Education Press, 2016) and Natalie Wexler’s The Knowledge Gap (Avery, 2019) are more recent illuminating reads on this topic.
  • Too much time is spent in schools trying to teach students reading “skills” such as “finding the main idea” or “determining the author’s purpose,” under the faulty assumption that there are discrete, learnable skills that will bolster comprehension. While there is value in focusing on vocabulary, other aspects of language, and some broad comprehension strategies (such as summarization), research shows that training in isolated textual-analysis skills (which proficient readers do with a high degree of automaticity) has little effect on students’ understanding of a reading passage (Shanahan, 2016; Steiner et al., 2019). The surest way to improve students’ comprehension is to increase their reading of knowledge-based texts and their writing about such texts (Steiner et al., 2019).
  • Meanwhile, there is little evidence to support the effectiveness of one of the most pervasive English language arts approaches—grouping students based on reading level for Tier-1 reading instruction (Shanahan, 2017; Sparks, 2018). Such practices can in fact reinforce achievement gaps, and they derive from a flawed basis for differentiation, since a student’s reading “level” can fluctuate dramatically, depending on the topic being read, and often doesn’t tell us much about what he or she needs to grow as a reader. Instead of grouping students by reading levels, some experts believe that challenging all students with grade-level texts, with scaffolding as necessary, best serves reading outcomes (Shanahan, 2017).

Light-Bulb Moments

I mentioned that the level of consensus on these findings was surprising to me. Part of the reason for this was that I hadn’t seen much evidence of practices reflecting them in classrooms. Prior to assuming my current role as chief academic officer of Jackson-Madison County Schools in Tennessee, I had spent the better part of two years working for Instruction Partners, a consulting organization that partners with districts to improve core academics. As I moved from school to school and room to room, I saw a whole host of reading-instruction practices but very little consistency—and very little that matched up with what I eventually learned about the research on the science of reading. Reflecting on this disconnect was an “aha” moment for me.

An even bigger light-bulb moment for me was when I fully considered the significance of Recht and Leslie’s “Baseball Study” and the importance of background knowledge to reading proficiency. As I reflected on this finding, it seemed to me that, as a chief academic officer, I had a moral obligation to ensure our students had the opportunity to systematically build knowledge by spending significant time going deep into specific topics, rather than jumping from story to story (or skills activity to skills activity) on a day-to-day basis.

And I should clarify that the fragmented curricular approach we often see in schools is not the fault of teachers. As leaders, we have not placed enough emphasis on providing our teachers with the cohesive instructional materials they need—we have spent far too long assuming they can simply create everything they teach. This is not working. If we want improvements in students’ reading abilities, it is incumbent upon us to place a laser-like focus on getting teachers the resources and knowledge they need to develop proficient readers.

Curriculum Matters

When I started in my current role a little over two years ago, our teachers had little to go by in terms of teaching reading. There were remnants of a previous reading curriculum in some classrooms, but one glance at the reviews on EdReports.org or Louisiana Believes—free online resources that publish detailed reviews of curricula—revealed major deficits in the program’s phonics and knowledge-building components. From what I’d learned already about improving early literacy, I knew we had to make a change.

After I did some additional research and set up a period of review and feedback for teachers, our district selected two new language arts curricula. One is for grades K–2 and centers on knowledge-building read-alouds and a structured phonics strand. The other, for grades 3–5, continues the knowledge-building process and provides students opportunities to read multiple authentic texts in each of the four modules that make up a grade level.

While neither of these curricula are perfect, they both check the big boxes indicated by the research: systematic phonics instruction, knowledge-building opportunities in fiction and non-fiction texts, and access to grade-level texts for all children.

Nine months after we decided to make a switch, these new curricula were implemented in every K–5 classroom in our district. Teacher training was an important part of the transition, and multiple curriculum-specific professional development opportunities were offered within the first few months. After one semester of implementation, more than twice as many of our kindergarten students scored above average on a phonemic awareness screener than ever before. Although gains in this area would be expected after explicit instruction on it, the pace of those gains was highly encouraging.

But even more important than the initial quantitative gains we’ve seen is the level of engagement our students are demonstrating as they build knowledge on a variety of reading topics. It’s impressive and encouraging to listen to 1st grade students talk about the purpose of the body’s skeletal system or to hear a 2nd grader explain why the Yellow River is yellow and how it sustains the surrounding farmland. We’ve also seen dramatic improvements in our 3rd–5th graders’ writing as a result of their knowledge-rich reading and class discussions.

My favorite moments come when students make connections between the foundational skills they are acquiring through systematic phonics instruction and the knowledge they are developing through their read-alouds. Recently, for example, I observed a kindergarten teacher conclude a lesson by asking for examples of words that start with the /l/ sound. One student promptly responded with “leaf,” and then added an explanation of the difference between the leaves on evergreen and deciduous trees (and yes, the student used the words evergreen and deciduous, both learned in our new curriculum’s domain on plants). I knew we were on the right track.

“Don’t Overcomplicate It”

For school leaders, one major challenge of making significant instructional changes, such as implementing new reading curricula, is the tendency to get hung up on the many factors involved and options available and to suffer from “paralysis by analysis” in decision making. This is compounded if you are a district leader who, like me, has little formal training in the science of reading. My advice to you is simple: Don’t overcomplicate it. The research indicates a clear path forward for a majority of students to learn to read proficiently, and there are a number of strong curricula available that can jump-start this process in your district.

In discussions around adopting a new reading curriculum, a number of administrator and faculty voices will raise questions about specific points of reading instruction. Do you teach letter names after letter sounds, or simultaneously? Who gets to choose what books and topics students will read about? Where does grammar fit in? In every district, there will also be teachers who harbor doubts about “off-the-shelf” curriculum and about having to change their practices.

Such issues are worthy of discussion, but they are not worthy of holding up an informed and necessary plan for curriculum adoption. Perfection is truly the enemy of progress if debates about the finer points of reading instruction delay action on the major components that are already agreed upon by the research. Improving outcomes at scale begins by painting with broad strokes. Maximizing impact locally, particularly at the school and classroom level, involves a finer brush and can be done as a school adapts to a curriculum. Acknowledging that both these processes are needed is not disingenuous; it is the reality of change.

School leaders must be willing to acknowledge that most teachers are not trained to write curriculum, despite the responsibilities we’ve often foisted on them. They are largely trained in pedagogy, which helps them tailor instruction to meet the needs of individual students. It is the pairing of coherent curriculum with pedagogical skill that translates into the art and science of teaching and truly drives learning.

The good news for leaders is that available curriculum options, particularly in early literacy, have become dramatically better in recent years, and the best new options are truly aligned to the research on reading development. They are “educative” curricula that empower professional learning about reading practice. Further, there are now reputable curriculum-review services, such as EdReports and Louisiana Believes, that can help educators evaluate available options. Knowledge is power, of course, and in the area of early literacy especially, school leaders must be willing to use it.

Leading for Reading

I am not aware of a school or district that is completely satisfied with the reading capabilities of its students. Year after year, we lament reading scores on state assessments and national assessments and the prevalence of students who are below-level readers. Yet, despite these shared concerns, an overwhelming number of schools and districts still allow for fragmentary and uneven curricula and instruction in early reading. If we are ready to address our national reading crisis at scale, we must stop assuming that teachers have what they need and that what we’re already doing will somehow work out. Instead, we need to lead thoughtful processes to adopt and implement strong curricula supported by the science of reading.

Jared can be reached via email at jamyracle@gmail.com or on Twitter, @JaredMyracle.

References

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read: Reports of the subgroups. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Recht, D. R., & Leslie, L. (1988). Effect of prior knowledge on good and poor readers’ memory of text. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80(1), 16–20.

Shanahan, T. (2016. January 19). Teaching reading comprehension and comprehension strategies. [Blog post]. Shanahan on Literacy. Retrieved from https://shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/teaching-reading-comprehension-and-comprehension-strategies

Shanahan, T. (2017, February 7). The instructional level concept revisited: Teaching with complex text. [Blog post]. Shanahan on Literacy. Retrieved from https://shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/the-instructional-level-concept-revisited-teaching-with-complex-text

Sparks, S. (2018, August 26.) Are classroom reading groups the best way to teach reading? Maybe not. Education Week.

Steiner, D., Magee, J., Jensen, B., & Button, J. (2019). The problem with “finding the main idea.” Learning First, Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy.

The Hidden Mistake School Leaders Should Avoid This Year

This piece — authored by Jared Myracle — was originally published by Education Week on September 2, 2019.

A better way to think about curricula

I can vividly remember my first few days as a new school administrator. I remember getting in a routine of greeting students as they exited buses and cars and entered the building. I remember the strange feeling when that first bell rang to start school, and I didn’t have a classroom full of students to teach. I remember peeking in classrooms and feeling the satisfaction of seeing students listening to their teachers and working diligently on the tasks assigned to them. What I don’t remember is ever considering that the work students were doing might be misaligned with their grade level.

Over the past few years, I have visited many schools in both my previous role as the director of instructional support at a professional development and curricular support organization and my current position as the chief academic officer of Jackson-Madison County public schools in Tennessee. When approaching these school visits with alignment to grade-level standards as the primary consideration, I have observed that the most common assumption school leaders make is one that doesn’t even occur to many as a topic that merits consideration. It’s an assumption so deeply ingrained in the day-to-day functions of school life that it can be hard to step back far enough to get a clear picture: that teachers have received enough training and resources to craft a full school year’s worth of aligned curriculum for their students.”The prevalence of misaligned materials is not the fault of teachers.”

What’s the problem with that assumption, you ask? Unfortunately, most teachers aren’t provided training in curriculum design during their teacher education programs. At least not to the level required to be able to design comprehensive curricula in multiple subjects that coherently articulate concepts, knowledge, and skills from one grade level to the next.

Recent research by TNTP indicates that students spend a shocking amount of time on assignments that do not address grade-level standards. I have seen similar evidence with my own eyes in classrooms. In one district I visited, I saw the same piece of literature being read in a 4th grade class and an 11th grade class.

The prevalence of misaligned materials is not the fault of teachers. They simply aren’t provided the type of training in curriculum design needed to prevent these missteps.

Why does a blind spot this big exist in the field of education? My guess is that it’s because we’ve never known any other way. However, the curricula-review organization EdReports.org provides plenty of reputable information on strong materials.

Most of us who attended traditional teacher education programs were required to prepare quite a few lessons to teach for the purposes of evaluation, but never an entire year’s worth that makes connections from the previous grade and leads to the next. If we were lucky, the schools in which we were placed had an aligned curriculum to guide our efforts. However, most of us were on our own. We stayed up night after night planning lesson after lesson to the best of our abilities.

If teachers are working independently in silos, they can hardly achieve the type of vertical coherence across grades needed to develop mathematical concepts, for example. The same is most likely true for the knowledge building required to bridge reading comprehension gaps.

Another unfortunate aspect of this fractured lesson planning is the lack of efficiency it places on already overworked educators. If a district with 100 3rd grade math teachers doesn’t provide an aligned curriculum, then 100 teachers are left to fend for themselves. There will be 100 3rd grade math teachers planning 100 different variations of 3rd grade math for students in the same schools and in the same district.

What happens if a student moves from one school to the next? What if teachers use different vocabulary to describe math concepts? Just imagine the opportunities for collaboration that could occur if those 100 teachers were working from the same playbook. When you consider this at scale, across districts and states, it is no longer a surprise that our national achievement rates are relatively stagnant.

Raising achievement should at least begin with making sure our students are being taught content that represents the expectations of their grade. Take a look in classrooms at your school. If teachers are being asked to pull everything together on their own, there is likely significant room for improvement when it comes to having greater alignment to your state’s academic standards.

Could teachers plan a demanding, aligned, and coherent curriculum? They certainly can with enough time, training, and resources. However, is it the best use of time for teachers to develop what they are going to teach, or should they spend more time tailoring an already planned and aligned curriculum to their individual students?

One option forces teachers to spend the lion’s share of their time on creating content; the other releases them to think about content in the context of their individual students. I believe that district leadership should provide teachers with strong resources and allow them to utilize their skills and abilities to focus on teaching students, not creating curriculum.

Curriculum adoption isn’t the answer to all of the challenges in education. However, it is a vital part of an equation that can’t be solved without it. One of my colleagues uses an interesting analogy about houses to explain the importance of curriculum in creating an aligned system: You wouldn’t construct a house on an insecure foundation, nor should we try to build our education system without stopping to make sure the footings of aligned content are in place.

Once teachers have a sound curriculum, they can move on to the more challenging components of building their capacity as educators. But it all starts with an honest assessment of the ground on which we are currently standing.

Jared can be reached via email at jamyracle@gmail.com or on Twitter.

Curriculum Notes

If you’d like to speak with me about the specific curricula used in my district, they are:

K–2 ELA:Core Knowledge Language Arts (all-green on EdReports, Tier 1 on Louisiana Believes)

3–5 ELA:EL Education Language Arts (all-green on EdReports, Tier 1 on Louisiana Believes)

6-12 ELA: LearnZillion Louisiana Guidebooks (Tier 1 on Louisiana Believes in grades 6–8)

K–12 Math: Eureka Math (all green on EdReports in grades K–5, Tier 1 on Louisiana Believes in K–12)

The Hard Part About Reading Instruction

This piece was originally published by Education Week on May 28, 2019.

We actually know quite a bit about how to teach reading. So why don’t we do it right?

Spoiler alert: The hard part about reading instruction is not figuring out how to teach reading. We actually know quite a bit about that. There has been renewed interest in discussing the findings of the 2000 National Reading Panel report on the importance of phonics-based instruction in the early grades. The popularity of Emily Hanford’s radio documentary “Hard Words” and Susan Pimentel’s Education Week Commentary “Why Doesn’t Every Teacher Know the Research on Reading Instruction?”—and the conversations both stirred—underscore that how we teach reading is far from settled, even 20 years after the publication of the panel’s report. Earlier this year, I co-authored a Commentary in this publication on the challenges we district leaders face when it comes to the research-based findings on reading instruction. We all have unfinished learning, but the research is clear. Reading isn’t just about decoding words.

Another critical element here is the central role that background knowledge plays in reading comprehension, which was demonstrated as early as 1988 by Lauren Leslie and Donna R. Recht’s seminal baseball study: If we want students to actually understand the words they are decoding, they must build a critical mass of background knowledge in order to provide context and meaning to what they are reading.

The hard part about reading instruction isn’t even deciding how to take action. Putting the research about reading instruction into practice has been simplified in recent years by the abundance of research-aligned curricula. Finding a suitable curriculum is now as easy as scrolling through EdReports.org and reading summaries of the “all green” options that signify positive standards alignment, usability, and quality. In my school district in Tennessee, we provided teachers with a few curricula options from this list, gathered feedback during a pilot period, and made a decision about what to use.

The hard part is not about the funding required to make these changes, either. On average, my district spent approximately $50 per student to replace all of our English/language arts curricula in every grade, kindergarten through 12th.

For school and district leaders, the hard part about reading instruction is leading a highly effective implementation and sticking to the plan long enough for the work to have a meaningful impact. Putting a new curriculum in a teacher’s hand won’t get the job done. He or she needs support in order to teach it well. Teachers also need time to learn how to communicate the material effectively to students, and students need time to develop academically while learning it. But “time” is not a welcomed word in education.

The good news is that students respond quickly when teachers deliver systematic phonics instruction. Students in the early grades can more readily recognize letters and letter sounds, segmenting, and blending if they are receiving systematic phonics instruction. (David Liben’s “Why a Structured Phonics Program is Effective” is a great summary on this topic.)“Putting a new curriculum in a teacher’s hand won’t get the job done.”

In my district’s first year of implementation with our chosen curriculum (Core Knowledge’s Skills Strand), we doubled the number of kindergarten students who scored above average on a phonics screener. This progress was mirrored by significant gains in the oral reading fluency of our 1st graders. Great instruction with strong materials can close skills gaps for our youngest students in a relatively short amount of time.

While students are making strides with their decoding skills, they must also be building the background knowledge on a wide array of topics needed to understand what they read. Instead of learning to read and then reading to learn, students can and should do both at the same time.

Many of the best curriculum options are structured this way. Embedding important historical figures and events, science concepts, exposure to a diverse array of cultures, and well-known fables and folktales in a coherent sequence within individual grades and across grade levels allows students to gradually connect meaning to otherwise unfamiliar topics as they read. But the key word here is “gradually.”

Vocabulary is like a tiny snowball at the top of a hill. If you can guide it down the right path, it will gradually grow bigger on its own. It just takes a plan and patience.

As a leader, developing this kind of vision for reading instruction requires the constant switching between a long-term and a short-term view. Seeing gains in foundational reading skills happens early and often. On the other hand, navigating a multi-year process of building students’ background knowledge is a more demanding journey. But the sooner we can all agree that there isn’t a bright and shiny program that will save us tomorrow, the sooner we can do right by our students by focusing on what will have the biggest impact in the long run.

If you pursue this course of action, your 3rd grade reading scores will be great, right? Maybe. It is possible to see signs of progress. After a year, the state of Tennessee defined the growth of our district’s 3rd grade students as “above expectations.” But deeper reading proficiency improves at a slow pace.

The knowledge-building required to turn proficient decoders into proficient readers is a long haul, especially for students living in poverty. Comprehension is dependent on understanding the vocabulary involved in any given reading topic, but the topics on high-stakes reading assessments rarely align with the exact topics that students read about in the classroom.

So how do we fix it? We rely on the research about systematic phonics instruction, and we keep students reading books, articles, and literature embedded in a coherent path of topics designed to build their background knowledge. It can be frustrating that there is no way to fast track knowledge-building. You just have to trust the process, and take it day by day.

The education field is notorious for giving up when the results aren’t immediate. But we should stick it out on this one and listen to the research on reading instruction. The rewards will come.

Jared can be reached via email at jamyracle@gmail.com or on Twitter.

Curriculum Notes

If you’d like to speak with me about the specific curricula used in my district, they are:

K–2 ELA:Core Knowledge Language Arts (all-green on EdReports, Tier 1 on Louisiana Believes)

3–5 ELA:EL Education Language Arts (all-green on EdReports, Tier 1 on Louisiana Believes)

6-12 ELA: LearnZillion Louisiana Guidebooks (Tier 1 on Louisiana Believesin grades 6–8)

K–12 Math: Eureka Math (all green on EdReportsin grades K–5, Tier 1 on Louisiana Believesin K–12)

We Have a National Reading Crisis

We are proud to bring our voices to the pages of Education Week with our recent editorial, We Have a National Reading Crisis.

It published on March 7th. Two weeks later, it’s still flying around Twitter and it remains the most-emailed story on EdWeek, so we believe we aren’t alone in thinking that these messages are important.

We thought we’d take a moment to share one piece of inspiration for the piece. It was this tweet:

We think Chad speaks for many when he says, “no one is going to be the Chief of Academics without understanding how children learn to read.” Earlier in our careers, we might have thought the same thing. But as we write: “We each learned critical reading research only after entering district leadership.” This seemed important to say, in order to address perceptions like Chad’s.

Superintendents and district leaders need to know that this can happen. Also, we must bring empathy and support for the educators who realize that they, too, have “unfinished learning” around literacy.

In writing the piece, we took pains to include links to let readers learn more about the national conversation, as well as the research behind our “five essential insights supported by reading research.” Below, we added a few additional links within the body of the piece which may interest readers seeking to learn more.

We would also encourage educators to explore our curation of Resources for more information on everything in this piece – from key reading research to resources for selecting curriculum that aligns with the research.

We plan to keep writing – here on this blog and hopefully again in education publications. Our Suggestion Box is open if there is something you want to discuss or hear about.

Thank you to all who have read and shared our editorial. Let’s keep the national conversation going.

– Jared Myracle, Brian Kingsley, and Robin McClellan

We Have a National Reading Crisis

ByJared Myracle, Brian Kingsley, & Robin McClellan

If your district isn’t having an “uh oh” moment around reading instruction, it probably should be. Educators across the country are experiencing a collective awakening about literacy instruction, thanks to a recent tsunami of national media attention. Alarm bells are ringing—as they should be—because we’ve gotten some big things wrong: Research has documented what works to get kids to read, yet those evidence-based reading practices appear to be missing from most classrooms. 

Systemic failures have left educators overwhelmingly unaware of the research on how kids learn to read. Many teacher-preparation programs lack effective reading training, something educators rightly lament once they get to the classroom. On personal blogs and social media, teachers often write of learning essential reading research years into their careers, with powerful expressions of dismay and betrayal that they weren’t taught sooner. Others express anger

The lack of knowledge about the science of reading doesn’t just affect teachers. It’s perfectly possible to become a principal or even a district curriculum leader without first learning the key research. In fact, this was true for us. If not for those unplanned learning experiences, we’d probably still be ignorant about how kids learn to read.

We each learned critical reading research only after entering district leadership. Jared learned during school improvement work for a nonprofit, while between district leadership positions. When already a district leader, Brian learned from reading specialists when his district received grant-funded literacy support. Robin learned in her fourth year as a district leader, while doing research to prepare for a curriculum adoption.

Understanding the research has been crucial to our ability to lead districts to improved reading outcomes. Yet each of us could easily have missed out on that critical professional learning. If not for those unplanned learning experiences, we’d probably still be ignorant about how kids learn to read.

There’s no finishing school for chief academic officers, nor is there certification on literacy know-how for district and school leaders. Literacy experts have been recommending the same research-based approaches since the 2000 National Reading Panel report, yet there still aren’t systemic mechanisms for ensuring this information reaches the educators who set instructional directions and professional-development agendas. Why should we be surprised to find pervasive misunderstandings?

Here are five essential insights supported by reading research that educators should know—but all too often don’t: 

  • Grouping students by reading level is poorly supported by research, yet pervasive. For example, 9 out of 10 U.S. 15-year-olds attend schools that use the practice. 
  • Many teachers overspend instructional time on “skills and strategies” instruction, an emphasis that offers diminishing returns for student learning, according to a Learning First and the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy reportthis year. 
  • Students’ background knowledge is essential to reading comprehension. Curricula should help students build content knowledge in history and science, in order to empower reading success. 
  • Daily, systematic phonics instruction in early gradesis recommended by the National Institute for Literacy, based on extensive evidence from the National Reading Panel. 
  • Proven strategiesfor getting all kids—including English-language learners, students with IEPs, and struggling readers—working with grade-level texts must be employed to ensure equitable literacy work. 

Educator friends, if any of these statements make you scratch your head, you probably have some unfinished learning.

Educators urgently need a national movement for professional learning about reading. We should declare a No Shame Zone for this work—to make it safe for all educators to say, “I have unfinished learning around literacy.”

Superintendents should ask their literacy leaders if research insights are understood and implemented in their classrooms. They must be prepared to invest in the unfinished learning of their team, from teachers to cabinet. Surely some educators will defend misguided approaches; we all tend to believe we are doing the right thing, until research shows us otherwise. On this point, we speak from experience. We encourage superintendents to lean into the national conversation about literacy, in order to ask the right questions.

Some may characterize this national dialogue as reopening the “reading wars,” which pitted phonics against whole language. Frankly, we don’t see it. We don’t frequently hear educators in our districts vigorously defending whole language, as such. More often, they’re simply doing what they believe to work, without knowing better. Instead, we primarily face a battle against misunderstanding and lack of awareness.

For example, some express fears that phonics instruction comes at the expense of students engaging with rich texts, yet every good curriculum we know incorporates strong foundational skills anddaily work with high-quality texts. The National Reading Panel got it right: Literacy work is a both/and, not either/or.

The battle against misunderstanding can be won by pairing professional learning with improved curriculum. Quality curriculum that is tailor-built to the research makes good practice tangible and achievable for teachers. Professional development around implementation of such high-quality curriculum is where it all comes together: Teachers are given the whatto use, and professional learning explains the whyand the howof those materials.

Districts today have many choices among research-aligned, excellent curricula, which was not the case even two years ago. These new curriculum options may be the catalyst we need to improve reading instruction. In each of our districts, we have implemented one of the newly available curricula that earned the highest possible rating by EdReports, a curriculum review nonprofit. Districtwide reading improvement followed.

The gap between good and mediocre curricula is vast. And district teams need a collective understanding of how kids learn to read before selecting new materials. The advances we have personally seen from high-quality curricula have led us to call for a national professional-learning network around curricula to foster cross-district collaboration.

We dream of the potential for children if we embrace this moment of unfinished learning.

Jared Myracle is the chief academic officer at Jackson-Madison County public schools in Tennessee. Brian Kingsley is the chief academic officer at Charlotte-Mecklenburg public schools in North Carolina. Robin McClellan is the supervisor of curriculum and instruction for elementary schools in Sullivan County public schools in Blountville, Tenn.

The urgency I feel around instruction – and why I look to curriculum

In recent years, as I have sought to deeply understand our new standards and put them into practice, I’ve had my eyes opened widely to some serious issues and misunderstandings with the reading instruction in our schools – both in the districts where I served as an educator and in the 15+ districts where I worked as an instructional support provider during my time at D2D, the nonprofit that became Instruction Partners.

My most striking insights came from spending time in classrooms. I used the Instructional Practice Guide (IPG), a superb resource from Achieve the Core that lets you gauge your instructional alignment to the new standards. I’d walk into a classroom and use the tool to compare the instruction I was seeing to the standards targeted by the teacher. In most classrooms, my heart would sink, because the text being taught was grade levels below the students. Or the instruction was geared to an earlier grade’s standard.

As an administrator, it’s easy to become defensive the first time you see this issue. ‘What do you mean my teachers aren’t teaching their grade’s standards?” But after seeing the same thing in many classrooms, that initial defensive reaction succumbs to a harsh reality: teachers haven’t been given the right tools and training to help them raise their day-to-day instruction to the level of our new standards.

Using the IPG in classrooms is a deeply impactful, tangible professional learning experience for school and district leaders. It illuminates the instructional realities so clearly. For me, it generated insights that pushed me to deepen my understanding of literacy and math practice. I started digging deeper into the research.

Recht and Leslie’s ‘baseball study’ was a huge eye-opener, helping me realize that background knowledge is absolutely critical to reading comprehension, then Why Knowledge Matters by E.D. Hirsch cemented that truth as gospel. More learning came from David Liben’s Why a Structured Phonics Program is Effective, as well as a slew of research on the shortcomings of leveled reading.  

In 2017, I took my current position as the Chief Academic Officer in the Jackson-Madison County School System, the district I attended from kindergarten through 12th grade. When I began, I made sure that my entire team did classroom walkthroughs with the IPG in hand, after getting familiar with the research. As I had seen in other districts, most of the instruction we observed was simply not aligned. It left our team downright anxious about implementing a solution: within days of those walkthroughs, and sometimes within hours, the principals and district leaders asked for help in closing our gaps. Our path to new curriculum immediately followed.

I’ve seen it time and again: once you know better, you feel an urgency to do better.

It’s odd to think that a 5th grade math class isn’t teaching 5th grade math, or that a 7th grade English/Language Arts lesson more closely aligns with 5th grade English/Language Arts, but a growing body of research – and my experience across 20 districts – suggest that this is a distinct possibility in a school near you. That likelihood is dramatically higher if your district isn’t implementing aligned curricula at all grade levels. I believe many district leaders are making an important mistaken assumption: that teachers have what they need to align their instruction to the standards.

This mistaken assumption is unfair to teachers. First of all, the newfound focus, coherence, and rigor of the standards shouldn’t rest totally on the shoulders of our teachers. It’s a big lift, and teachers deserve tools and support. School and district leaders bear the responsibility of ensuring the presence of strong curriculum. Secondly, we’re measuring teachers against these new expectations, but too often, we aren’t giving them the tools to get there. It’s not fair to them or their students.

Curriculum is the solution I look to, because it’s the best way to align school and district teams around instructional goals quickly. In my district, we talk a lot about ensuring we have the right “what” and an effective “how,” meaning that we need a strong curriculum and we must teach it effectively. One without the other won’t get you very far. But one of the easiest and most cost-effective boxes a district leader can check is that of ensuring high-quality materials are in every classroom in the district.

That solves the issue of “what” is being taught. Curriculum must then be paired with tailored PD focused on  HOW it is intended to be used. That said, really great curriculum itself is often educative, and embeds professional learning within the materials, so teachers are having new ‘aha’ moments as they teach. Instructional routines and protocols for each lesson and activity offer invaluable cues for important practices, such as fostering rich discourse around texts in ELA, conducting math talks, etc. Lesson planning becomes more about internalizing the content and activities outlined in the curriculum and how to best teach those to the students in a specific class and less about creation of materials. Teachers shouldn’t be expected to write the music, conduct the symphony, and play the instruments all at the same time.

Loads of research says that curriculum is a powerful agent to improve outcomes. I have lived that research in Jackson-Madison County Schools: last year was our first year implementing new curriculum in K–12 ELA and math, and we were one of the fastest-improving districts on the TVAAS index, Tennessee’s value-added assessment system. We credit our curriculum work as playing a significant role in those gains.

I don’t see enough districts appreciating the potential of curriculum. Perhaps that’s because a few years ago, there weren’t many curricula aligned to the new standards. Fortunately, that has changed – education leaders describe a “curriculum renaissance.” I’ve seen that firsthand: all four curricula that we adopted in Jackson-Madison County became available in the last few years. If you haven’t looked at curriculum lately, I’m betting that what you find will surprise you.

Right now, I particularly sense growing anxiety about reading instruction. Between Emily Hanford’s Hard Words, Sue Pimentel’s excellent spotlight on instructional issues, and the rest of the news coverage, we’re having a national “Uh Oh” moment of reckoning about a major problem: our teacher preparation programs haven’t given educators a baseline knowledge of research on how kids learn to read. Essential practices are missing from classrooms, and misunderstandings abound.

With that growing awareness and anxiety, it’s an opportune moment to build a national Professional Learning Network (PLN) of curriculum & instruction leaders addressing these issues. Let’s connect around curriculum – the best toolkit we have for improved instruction in our classrooms – and around the professional learning that is needed to shift practices. In Tennessee, where the TN Lift network (organized by TN Score) has provided an invaluable PLN for my work. I am excited by the potential of national collaboration.

If you are feeling urgency to improve your literacy and math work – I hope you’ll join a community of like-minded educators in the Curriculum Matters PLN. Whether you join because you are trying to understand the critical research… or because you are grappling with understanding the new curriculum options… or because you’re implementing a new high-quality curriculum, and want a PLN to aid your success… you’ll find a growing community working through the same problems of practice.

As school and district leaders, we face a lot of complex issues. But we shouldn’t overthink this one. Identifying and procuring aligned curricula is a fairly simple process, if you know of review sites like EdReports.

Implementing effectively? That’s a whole separate issue. People like the notion of having something “better” but they generally don’t like the word “different.” Let’s tackle these change management challenges together as a community of practitioners.

Most of all, we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of this work. The outcomes we’re seeing with excellent curriculum in my district, and the outcomes I hear from my peers in other districts, deserve a national conversation.

In Jackson-Madison County, we are in the early stages of this process and are encouraged by the growth we see in students every day. Jump in with us and let’s learn together.


Curriculum Notes

If you’d like to speak with me about the specific curricula used in my district, they are: