Rebecca Redelmeier writes in Chalkbeat about passage of a new law in Pennsylvania mandating the use of “evidence-based” reading instruction. By that, they mean that teachers should teach reading by relying on what is called “the science of reading.” This terminology is based on a federal report that was released to the public in 2000, affirming the importance of phonics, the connections of letters and sounds.
The Department of Education spent $6 billion testing the “science of reading” recommendations. The program–Reading First–was abandoned after investigations found conflicts of interest and self-dealing among Department staff who awarded contracts.
When Reading First was evaluated, the results were unimpressive. Students did well in phonics but comprehension levels were unchanged.
Now states are mandating the same approaches that were tested 25 years ago.
Redelmeier wrote:
Pennsylvania will require schools to adopt evidence-based reading curriculum by the 2027-28 school year and institute new literacy instruction training for teachers.
The new requirements come as part of the state’s 2025-26 budget, which Gov. Josh Shapiro signed into law Wednesday, four months past the budget deadline. Literacy instruction and initiatives will get $10 million in the budget. The $50.1 billion budget deal puts $665 million total towards public schools.
Moments before signing the bill, Shapiro said the budget invests in “something known as structured literacy,” referring to an approach to reading instruction that includes teaching students phonics and phonemic awareness, which research supports as effective.
The approach “puts a renewed emphasis on teaching [kids] to read well and training our teachers to teach reading effectively,” Shapiro said.
Last year, national test scores showed only about 1 in 3 Pennsylvania fourth graders could read at a proficient level.
Some Pennsylvania school districts previously used reading curriculums that did not follow research-backed methods. In Philadelphia, the school district implemented an evidence-based curriculum last school year. But the rollout has been rocky. Students’ reading scores dippedafter the first year.
The curriculum mandate brings Pennsylvania up to speed with several other states that have passed laws that require literacy instruction to follow the science of reading, a body of research that has found young children need phonics instruction to learn how to read well.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
While doing some cleaning recently, I came across my badge from the conference of the International Reading Association in Atlanta late in the last century. I recall at that event the venerable phonics proponent, Jeanne Chall, being booed during her keynote address by the disciples of the “Whole Language” model of reading instruction. I worked periodically with one of the theory’s founders, Ken Goodman, but could never accept that what he called a “psycholinguistic guessing game” was the best way to teach kids to read. Before long, the pendulum swung back toward phonics-based instruction and eventually to where we are today. Wouldn’t it be nice to find an approach that was effective and resistance to the politics of the moment?
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Finally! Base our teaching on what research tells us actually works, not on what is traditional.
When I was five in 1947 “sight reading” the rage and phonics were considered old fashion and not effective. I suffer from dyslexia, which was unknown at the time (I was just slow). As a result, I have had spelling issues all my life and developed coping skills to deal with it.
Since reading, writing and spelling have been an issue for my entire life and I’m an educator I have paid attention to all the reading fads that cycled through reading education since the 1960s. They have tended to be created by taking an old method that seemed to have worked in the past and changed the words used, like changing “viewpoint” to “paradigm.”
When I see the authors using what we used to call $1000 words for plain old English words I immediately suspect that what we are seeing is old ideas being shined up and repackaged so the author can tour the country giving teacher in-services for substantial fees.
This method claims to be based on reading research, and I would need to see who did the research, the methodology, the data and the results before I will support it. But it does seem to have promise.
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A reply in a metaphor of four (or for) anecdotes.
In 1974 teaching 7th graders, we taught students to diagram sentences! Of relevance, it was an interdisciplinary curriculum so I had them diagram the Preamble! The visual is pretty good.
We also started a short skills block with a dictation. Teacher or student reads aloud, class writes it out. Then the spelling and punctuation check.
Granddaughter started kindergarten. Loves it. She loves books. Now she wants to know how to spell everything (no “sound it out”). She was making a bakery menu and asked how to spell Donut / Doughnut. Hmmm.
At a restaurant the other night a family of 3 walks in. Little girl about 10 had a book she was reading even while waiting to be seated. I looked over later… Little girl engrossed in her book. Mom and Dad each on their phones.
The old school commenters here might recall it wasn’t so complicated until we started writing those mission statements “…to prepare students for the 21st century!”
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Right about that, Missouri!
I always loved diagramming sentences.
Then someone decided that was pointless and it was dropped. When one of my sons was in fifth grade, I asked if she knew how to diagram sentences. She said of course but we don’t do that anymore. I asked her to teach him.. she did and he enjoyed it. He thought it was a game. Within days, all the others wanted to know how to do it.
Diagramming taught me about sentence structure. It has served me well.
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I loved diagramming sentences as well. I think in a way it prepared me for understanding Chomsky’s transformational generative grammar, which I later studied in a linguistic course.
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I thought diagramming sentences was stupid, maybe because I didn’t have it until after I was expected to know it. (We moved half way across the country.) I found it impossible to remember the correct slashes etc. It was very frustrating and really didn’t teach me much about how the different parts of speech et. could be used to improve/ enhance writing.
It was very much like teaching phonics in isolation from the whole reason to understand the phonetic structure of words. No wonder that comprehension tanked if literacy instruction was reduced to blurting out sounds without integrating meaning into the instruction. I don’t need to be able to dissect every word phonetically before I get to enjoy reading. That point was driven home to me when I had Latino students who could fluently read a passage and have absolutely no idea what it said. At some point in my past, I remember reading the “wisdom” of some guru who recommended that children’s story books have no pictures, so they couldn’t use context clues from the images.
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You clearly had a terrible teacher for sentence diagramming, which is simply a straightforward method for teaching the relations between sentence parts and varieties of sentence construction. Sorry you had that experience. The quality of the teaching makes ALL the difference.
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Here’s what I know and as an “old fart” I am probably repeating myself. We had this thing where the students had to read so many “books” at first then it turned into so many “pages” per week. The teacher had to turn in their list each week and boy if they didn’t, all hell broke loose. I know (and for all the extra stuff I did on my own time) got no slack on this one. So, I read the rules carefully and it stated that students could read to their younger siblings. I went to the library and checked out as many quality picture/poetry/story books I could find. I made my little tally sheets and let the “crazy kids read.” Up until this point, it was mandated that we do “silent reading” for 20 minutes per day. For those who were great readers/loved to read — they were fine; others who hated reading it was a pure nightmare. “I hate reading! Coupled with “I hate writing.” To me (not coming from an out of college teaching program but more of a second career), I saw their pain. Magazines didn’t count; Goosebumps (they loved at the time weren’t ‘real books’, and the newspaper or other things to read weren’t real reading choices. So, back to the kids books. I let the kids go and have fun reading. They questioned me, “Mr. Charvet, are you sure these books count? They are “baby books.” I said, “Didn’t say you could read to your brothers or sisters?” “Yes.” And how would one know if the book was any good if we didn’t read it first? We are good to go!” I never saw so many smiles; so many found memories pop up, e.g., “Were you in Mrs. Johnson’s class when should used to read to us? Oh I loved that.” For most, the “hate to read” came about third grade (I did my own unofficial study but good enough to understand why it was such a chore to read). The other great thing I witnessed was when the kids would go to my back cabinet to get a magazine(s) for art collages and end up giggling and having a great time. “What are you kids doing back there? I told you no reading, just art.” Of course it was all in jest, but these middle school kids who hated to read, were reading! And reading old 1965 National Geographic Magazines because it had “cool spider eggs” and dinosaurs in them. They loved it. And then we had to get organized, the frowns came. I had to turn in my “reading sheets” to provide evidence that these kids were reading. Some were embarrassed because they did not read well. I told them, “You know how many books I read last year? Two?” Let’s see, by my count, 150 pages makes about a book for your level. I went on to explain if they read so many pages and how that equated to books read. It was a safe environment to express how they felt about reading. I told the kids, “If you read this many pages per week, by the end of the year, you would have read half the Scholastic Book ordering page! That’s awesome.” I told them that the way I learned “stuff” was by reading everything from napkins to matchbook covers to little sayings on tea bags to most everything. And if you do that you might win that “You want to be a millionaire show!” But, of course, the kids get beat down, they lose their spirit, and back to “I hate reading” because they are so nervous about remembering what they read for some test, the joy is nowhere to be found.
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Professional teachers should be able to adapt curriculum to meet students’ needs, which may vary from one student to another. Teachers should have the freedom to decide on the best approach on the based on student assessment. One size fits all models often miss the mark for atypical students. For example, some students enter kindergarten reading fluently while other may have little understanding of phonics. Teachers should be able to modify instruction to best serve students based on their needs. All approaches to reading should teach the student to understand and apply the sound-relationship in order to read. In addition, teachers should try to create opportunities for students to read and write embedded in reading lessons as it develops an appreciation for and, in some cases, a love of reading. Comprehension is a far more complex skill for students to master as it depends on language and higher order thinking skills. Students need both phonics and comprehension skills in order to become competent, fluent readers.
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At my LAUSD school we used a program with a very heavy emphasis on phonics—really more “phonics with a sprinkling of Balanced Literacy.” I don’t see a huge difference between what we did and what today’s Science of Reading programs recommend.
But our school served many second-language learners, and I always felt we were putting the cart before the horse: we focused intensely on early reading skills while spending far too little time on English language development. In kindergarten, teachers drilled phonics constantly, and students scored well on phonics assessments—but their English was still very limited. That lack of oral language inevitably hindered their progress as readers.
I know that Structured Literacy in theory supports strong language development for English learners. My concern is whether the implementation in classrooms will devote enough time to the specific language needs of second-language learners—rather than repeating the same pattern of emphasizing decoding at the expense of oral language.
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New English learners need to understand, speak, read, write English as well as understand the target culture as well. If a school has an ESL/ENL or competent bilingual program, students should get the instruction they require to function in English. Even with tailored instruction, it takes time to master a new language.
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Soon Trump will deport all the English learners!
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That would be a pity. They come with talent and a different perspective that makes life more interesting.
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It’s already happening. I read about it today from ProPublica.
ICE Has Placed a Record 600 Immigrant Kids in Federal Shelters This Year — ProPublica
And this from 2022 — these were children torn from their parents at the border during Trump 1.0
Thousands of Immigrant Children Wait in Government Shelters — ProPublica
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How awful that kids have to suffer like this, Lloyd. Rick Perry was right when he said his fellow Republicans didn’t have a heart.
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The Science of Reading is a formula that will cause kids to hate reading.
A better way is to foster a love for reading, which is a crucial goal for overall academic success and lifelong learning. The core idea is that a love for reading is often the result of being able to read successfully, not the other way around.
That is how I learned to read by enjoying what I read. I literally ignored everything the teachers taught us in English classes K-12. While the teachers were putting students to sleep with drills, I always sat in the back holding my open textbook so the teacher couldn’t see the fiction book I was hiding and reading. In high school, I read two books a day while barely passing my English classes with D minuses for all four years of high school.
Onen of my elective classes in high school all four years was as a library helper where I earned all A grades helping other students find books and returning books to the shelves. I loved reading but didn’t enjoy English classes which were all drill BS.
Because of those poor grades in high school, when I went to college after the US Marines and Vietnam, they thought I wasn’t ready so I had to take a reading class to determine which bone headed English class I’d have to take.
That reading test showed I was already reading at the college level before I left high school, while earning all those poor grades in English classes, ignoring the teachers and reading hundreds of books for enjoyment.
Just reading for fun improves the ability to read.
The Science of Reading movement leads to “boring” or “irrelevant” books, with some educators arguing the focus on analysis (like vocabulary lists and comprehension questions) can make reading seem like a frustrating task rather than a source of enjoyment or escape.
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I thought that was what Balanced Literacy was all about. I take it from the conceptual and not clinical aspect with the key word being balanced. A little of this and a little of that.
Teacher trained by Lucy Caulkins (yes, I used her name) figured out that they needed to meet kids where they are so they added phonics, picture cues, word recognition, and context. What a concept. Trust the professionals. (Fountas and Pinnell incorporated (some of) that).
The problem is like everything else today. The politicians think they know more than the professionals because some parent stopped them in the grocery aisle and railed on the “three cueing system” (now ‘illegal’ in Missouri).
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The next time I go to a hospital, I sooo look forward to my doctor’s diagnoses being based on what the state legislature told her she could and couldn’t decide for herself and the legislation being based on what some tech broligarchs lobbied for because they thought it would sell the most “personalized” tech products. Awesome!
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I digress but the anti-intellectual attitude of a few conservatives give the party a bad name. Making America whatever they call it Again embraces old methods without incorporating or building on any progress, science, and research.
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We are doomed
https://theweek.com/education/college-students-read-books
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We’ve been talking on this blog about this as one of the eventual outcomes of CCSS for decades.
It gives me no satisfaction, whatsoever, to tell anyone that we were “right”.
The NYTimes is, once again, sounding the alarm about the crisis in our educational systems. As with the CCSS, they will soon be trumpeting the next “new and improved” quick fix. A trusted source of news information, they will never take responsibility for the part they’ve played in the creation of this situation.
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Working class students today are victims of Silicon Valley’s commodification of education. Our young people are getting a top-down miseducation. I think Frank Smith was correct in saying that “reading is thinking.” Perhaps it is one reason so many young people fell for this administration’s propaganda. They cannot read and think.
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”Perhaps it is one reason so many young people fell for this administration’s propaganda. They cannot read and think.”
I’ve been thinking this as a possibility.
It’s part of a theory that’s been mentioned on this blog for awhile. That the CCSS was designed to limit or eliminate critical thinking skills within the general public. Create a compliant and easily led working class, led by the elite that has been educated in private schools. Schools that include critical thinking skills as a regular part of their curriculum.
If this theory is accurate, I wonder whether D. Trump and the like (aka: dictators/fascists) were factored into the equation.
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There is no single method of teaching reading (or anything) that will be equally effective for everybody.
Reading was easy for me from the start. I don’t know why. I do know that my mother read to me all the time.
As a first grader they put me in the Advanced Reading group. Our reward was that we got to hone our craft after lunch. At recess. I’d sit at the window watching the kids out in the playground. That didn’t last very long.
Third grade was when phonics was introduced to our school. I didn’t see the need but learned it anyway. So happy I did, now, as it gave me the ability to teach it in later years to people who responded best to that method of instruction.
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Here’s what I know from the trenches. And when I say trenches, that’s where I started. And, I am just conveying what actually happened in the classroom. Didn’t know any better; just did what I thought best with really minimal support and I asked a lot of questions to the “experts” who were obtuse. “Just do it. It will work.” Can you show me. Eh, never the case. New guy. Finally got a teaching gig other subbing. They were so happy to find someone willing to teach this class of unruly students. Their second grade teacher left them mid year; the next one left as well. We were on “year-round” school and I was track A. Track A was known for a very high transient population. I knew really nothing else, but glad I had a job. Being ignorant to the entire teaching “thing” and terminology (I wasn’t an idiot) but nearly all my students had some sort of learning disability. Either undiagnosed or diagnosed (just move them to the next teacher and call it a behavior issue) because for every student who really, really needed help it took time. Silly me, I thought I could take time and help; explain things. Oh no! You must cover the curriculum and get through the book! Mr. Charvet you take far too much time explaining things. You name it, my kids had it. There were a handful of proficient students, but like three. The first thing I noticed is that the kids didn’t know their “sounds.” Yes, later I found out it was phonemic awareness. Whatever, the treatment was the same; help kids sound out their words. A veteran teacher taught me about “Slingerland” techniques. This is a sounding matches a kinesthetic movement. ‘Eh, Eh, Eh…edge.” Touch the edge of the desk. We also used Touchpoint math. And, then mix in a majority of ESL/EL students who saw words that looked like those in Spanish, but weren’t. We had started Whole Language and they told us, “I do not want to see any phones books in your classroom!” The veteran teachers said, “Hide them and use them when they aren’t around.” I thought it was stupid to just “chuck” phonics completely. Most kids fumbled around with Whole Language, but Lupe flourished. She could read like there was no tomorrow. Until she was asked about what she read. Low comprehension. She was a great mimic. Kinda like ABBA singing songs but had no idea of the English language. Lupe was smart and so with a little time and energy, we got her on her way. She is probably a doctor by now. The best approach was “lowering the affective filter” and making kids feel it was okay going at their pace. Oh and how they loved after lunch reading when I read ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” while they used the description from the book to try and draw the Oompa Oompahs. Totally engaged.Billy came to my class. The parents said, “Can he sit in front? He has learning disabilities. Billy couldn’t read. Not a word. I worked with him. Small groups, too. By parent night, Billy could read an entire page. He was from a divorced family. Real mom came to parent night and I was so proud of Billy, I had him read a page to her. “This kid. He could read all along; he just didn’t want to. Nice response. Made the kid and me feel like crap. Whatever the case, my teaching career was made up of “passed over kids.” Billy now works and manages a floor tiling business and successful. Another little boy was looking at the board and started crying. He said he could see the words, but when they went into his head, they were all jumbled. I told him it would be okay and we would get him help. Year round was three months on, one month off. On my month off, I attended many meetings to help him. His grandma told me the day he graduated high school, they had prayed that I came into his life. I do my research; I look at their records and it all boils down to mostly “It’s a lot of work to help a child; pass them on.” At the end of the school year, my kids were almost ready for third grade after testing. Now move them to fourth. And the next grade. Most just give up. Many from that class I saw later at the continuation high school. So, tell me how does the SOR thing fix all of this? All I know is really no one ever asks the kids. And they will tell you what works.
In my final year, I taught 8th grade and they had Accelerated Literacy where students were assigned a lexile number based on their test scores. And they could only read books aligned with their lexile number. One student wanted to read about astronauts. Nope! Too high of a lexile number. Over there are the picture books. Their scores would go up sometimes and then one time I noticed they went waaaaaay down. I asked, “What happened?” The kids said they added a timer and their eyes kept looking at the timer. Then they flat out said, “We hate this. Do we have to go to the reading center again. We hate it.” I had knots in my stomach when I was there as well. And then when I taught at the continuation and a priority was to get students to proficiency, talk about telling a kid he is reading at a primer lever– outta here, man! I was always fascinated that everything seemed to be a competition. Look at the numbers. Oh, joy. Look at more numbers. Great. Look at the kids. Frowns all around with their last words, “I hate reading.’
One mind at a time. Just had to share my story. Happy Thanksgiving.
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Beautiful stories, Rick!
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Diane, I woke up this morning after tossing and turning about whether or not to “tell my tales” but I feel better now. It really IRKS me to hear all these experts about their magic elixirs. It takes time, empathy, and a passion to help students where they are — one mind at a time. No one sees the little kid who breaks out in tears; the kid who tells me he can’t remember what he read half way down the page so they stick him in a corner and say, “do they best you can and don’t make trouble.” All the sloppy paperwork, lack of follow through, and the audacity to blame teachers or reminding them if they only worked harder. Being in the arts exposed me to a lot of people across the state and country who loved the arts, but were not art teachers, but used the arts to enhance their students’ learning. Through many conversations, I learned things. Like notching a piece of card stock so the student would only see one or two words and not to be distracted by all the words moving around; falling off the page; or by the rivers and valleys due to poor typography. Many had dyslexia and I was surprised that many had not been given an amber lens to help. Some of my students wore the rose colored glasses which made their lives successful. Call me “McGuyver” but I always treated my kids the way I would like to be treated. And I learned from the kids. I remember standing at the board and have AH, HAH! moments. “See kids, check it out. It really works! And on the diagramming for me (as a teacher) was another WOW! And for Charvet to be wowed was something “No really kids. It’s not boring. If you learn to diagram it really works. It breaks down every word. You will be a grammar expert!” I am tearing up remembering them all. Even when I was explaining exclamation marks, hit my desk, my coffee cup leaped into the air, spilled all down he side while a student watched my dumb move. I looked at her and said, “Well, you will never forget how to use an exclamation mark!” We both laughed. I did a lot of dumb stuff but in the end, the kids had a safe place to learn.
Just had to tell the tale. Thanks for listening.
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Thank you, Rick. You know kids. You must have been a great teacher!
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Sadly, the politicians who are “the establishment” in Massachusetts may soon inflict SOR on our state, too.
Last year a successful ballot initiative, which originated with the AFT and NEA locals, did away with passing MCAS (the state standardized test) as a requirement for receiving a diploma. About 700 kids per year, having completed all the other requirements were being given a Certificate of Completion in lieu of a diploma. Nearly all those kids had learning disabilities or had English as their second language.
The lack of a diploma made attending even a program for hairdressing out or reach, as well as community college, which is now free in MA, due to another ballot initiative, the FairShare amendement, also sponsored by the teachers unions.
The state board has appointed a committee, heavy on business people, to use another test than the MCAS to functionally reinstate the testing requirement for a diploma and now they are insisting on ignoring teachers’ expertise in teaching reading to prescribe SOR. I guess our “betters” think teachers are getting too big for their britches. By the way, amid the wrestling mogul’s decision that teaching isn’t a profession, Massachusetts requires teacher obtain a master’s within five years to obtain professional status. Irony is not dead.
The essential Mo Cunningham has thoughtfully connected the dots of the SOR push in MA:
https://www.masspoliticsprofs.org/2025/10/01/coalition-of-billionaires-masquerades-as-mass-reads-coalition/
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That makes my blood boil. So NY will come off the list of the six states still requiring high school exit exam– but MA will go back on it. Ashamed to say we in NJ are among them. If you don’t pass the NJGPA, there are alternative options like achieving a certain score on other stdzd tests like SAT, ACT, or PSAT, or by submitting a portfolio appeal to the state Department of Education. There’s a jr yr practice NJGPA. My youngest’s (SpecEd) practice test showed him to be in danger of flunking the math section, so they had him take 2 back-to-back math classes sr yr (one new material, the next reviewed the new material); he passed. He did fine at Mercy College (including in the math for artsies style math reqt).
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