The New York Times asked 37 education experts to rank the best ideas for reforming schools. This is a gift article. Many of you are current or retired teachers. Please read it and share your thoughts.
The experts were asked to rank the “best ideas” by their effectiveness and their cost.
Among the five “most effective ideas” were:
- Small-group tutoring.
- Science of reading.
- Universal pre-K.
- Increase per-student funding.
- Increase teacher pay for high-poverty schools.
The authors–Sarah Mervosh, Francesca Paris, and Claire Cain Miller–begin:
U.S. schools are facing a daunting problem. Students simply can’t read or do math as well as they used to.
Student test scores have declined over the last decade, in an academic slump that started before the pandemic and has continued since. Compared with 2015, reading scores are down in 83 percent of districts, and math declines are nearly as pervasive.
But improving student achievement is notoriously difficult. Do schools need more money? Better teachers? More standardized testing? Less?
What could actually help turn things around?
We asked 37 top academics and researchers who study education to rate a range of ideas for both effectiveness and cost, on a scale of 1 to 7.
*****£*******
Overall, no single idea was enough on its own, experts said. And no idea would be successful unless it was executed well. But the results showed there are a number of ideas that can work.
We asked experts to evaluate each idea for its impact on academic achievement, which is generally measured by standardized test scores.
Lots of other things matter, too, including enrichment activities like the arts, teacher work satisfaction, and student excitementabout learning. Children also have other needs beyond academics, including mental health and well-being.
But given the results of the last decade, we were interested in what could lift student achievement, which is tied to many later life outcomes, for students, society and the economy.
Interestingly, the least effective idea was “private school vouchers.” Second, reduced class size. Third, increase all teacher pay.
Among the comments, the most frequent complaint was: “Why didn’t you ask the real experts–the teachers?”
My biggest complaint about the survey and the responses is that it omits the most powerful influences on student performance in the classroom: the effects of poverty, family stability and support, health, and other factors outside the teacher’s control. According to the American Statistical Association, about 1-14% of variation in test scores is under the teachers’ control. This is not to say that teachers don’t make a difference, but that you can’t change a child’s academic performance if he or she is persistently sick, absent, has vision or dental problems, doesn’t get fed regularly, and lives in substandard housing.
I didn’t see any mention of community schools, which address some of these problems, making sure that children have medical check-ups, dental and vision screening, have a food pantry and clothing supply, offer job counseling for parents, etc. That is, the school recognizes that the children’s well-being is a necessary precondition to school performance.
I don’t have all the answers. Some of the ideas in the survey are good; some don’t go far enough. But if this I feel sure: children are at their best when they are healthy, when they are well-nourished, when they don’t worry about the physical safety of themselves or their family, when they have a stable home.
Maybe that is too much to hope for in our highly individualistic society, where everyone is on their own and expected to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, even if they don’t have any bootstraps.
Recommended reading:
Richard Rothstein, Class and Schools.
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level
Yes, they should have asked the teachers! When I saw the top idea
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Children are at their best when they are healthy, when they are well-nourished, when they don’t worry about the physical safety of themselves or their family, when they have a stable home.
Diane, that is the answer in a nutshell. Spot on.
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That IS the key.
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We certainly see a different list when education experts are actually asked instead of economists or business groups. I believe the overarching message is that education requires investment, not gimmicks or ideologically driven pedagogy. Teachers should be well-trained and respected, and they should be able to earn enough money to buy a family home and a decent car every ten years or so.
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As a teacher, especially as an English teacher, yes, I have the solution. It’s actually only one thing. It would work. And it’s simple, easy, and not “cost effective” but cost prudent. In order to solve a problem, one must identify the problem, and the problem is:
“The authors–Sarah Mervosh, Francesca Paris, and Claire Cain Miller–begin:
U.S. schools are facing a daunting problem. Students simply can’t read or do math as well as they used to.“
Horse hockey! “A Nation at Risk” we are not. The problem is the problem. It’s not a problem! Never was. Public education in the United States was the envy of the world before Reaganomics decided it wasn’t. It still can be. The solution to the problem is quite simply for Sarah Mervosh, Francesca Paris, Claire Cain Miller, The New York Times, economists, hedge fund managers, tech entrepreneurs, heck, the entire, vast, data-deluded education-industrial complex to get out of the way. The solution is the Great Society, the 1965 ESEA, with funding directed at high poverty schools instead of at test prep fads. Community schools are a great idea, an extension of the ideals of the ESEA.
In order to succeed by any measure we choose, if we must so choose, Congress has to drop the testing mandate in the NCLB-ESSA and rewrite the law to return it to its original, Great intent. More funding for high poverty, not for test scores. Title 1. And it wouldn’t hurt to get rid of all legislation forcing on everyone “school choice” and the enhanced de facto segregation that goes with it. High stakes testing and privatization are epic fails. Period.
Education does not need to be repaired; it needs to be restored to its former self. “Reformers”, get out of the way. Let me teach.
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Exactly. Totally nailed it. I wish that every politician and bureaucrat at every level–city, state, and federal–would read and take seriously this post.
The Truth!
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Not to mention that this is a global phenomenon. Thanks to sloppy or downright disingenuous ed media coverage, any comment thread on an article such as this one shows that American public assumes US students decline as other nations advance.
Here’s what Google AI has to say:
K-12 student test scores in most OECD member nations have declined over the last decade.
Data from the OECD PISA show historic drops across member countries:
Reading Scores: Average reading scores across OECD countries fell by 28 points between 2015 and 2025, reaching their lowest average levels in 26 years (peaking around 2012 and dropping steadily since).
Mathematics Scores: Math scores across the OECD dropped by 22 points, falling especially sharply after 2018.
Science Scores: Science performance saw a more gradual decline over the past decade, hitting record lows in average OECD performance.
Low Performers: Roughly 29% of 15-year-olds in OECD countries are now estimated to be low performers across all three core subjects (up from 25% in 2022).
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The first thing that must be done is to define “education”.
If you asked our Founding Fathers, such as Thomas Jefferson, “education” for Americans meant providing a well-rounded experience in learning about all aspects of life that began with reading and writing skills and included science, philosophy, government, and fine arts, among many other areas of learning. The fundamental precept was to give America a population that had a well-rounded view of our nation and their role in fulfilling the promises of our Constitution.
That was America’s basic understanding of “education” until around 1970 when an industrial mindset overtook our culture and schools came to be seen as factories for churning out persons who could fulfill a “productive” role as a cog in the machinery of business and industry. “Education” became training.
Today, you see the result throughout our nation: Graduates of prestigious universities who are well-trained attorneys, well-trained doctors, well-trained financiers, well-trained cogs in the American economy.
But, they aren’t educated.
Government to them has always been some abstract thing that is to be operated by minions who are elected for that purpose. Philosophy is something almost laughable, not something that is the foundation of our freedoms. The arts are something to be exploited (like nearly everything else) for profit and investment. And on and on…
Only after the definition and purpose of “education” is agreed on can there be any substantial, unified progress in creating curricula and schools and producing teachers who will fulfill that definition and purpose. Lacking widespread agreement among all strata of society on the definition and purpose of education, we will remain splintered and ineffective.
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Living wage Free universal healthcare Affordable housing Small class size Stop funding schools from local property taxes School integration
Arthur H. Camins Science Educator, Education Consultant, Writer e: arthurcamins@gmail.com url: http://www.arthurcamins.com/ twitter: @arthurcamins https://twitter.com/arthurcamins
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One more thing (I have a comment with my solution in moderation), union teachers are better teachers. When teachers have unions protecting our academic autonomy, employment stability, salaries, and benefits, we are able to better serve. The New York Times would do well to start supporting teachers unions, or at least stop bashing them.
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Students need to read more, write more, and fix engines or program electronic devices more. You are good at what you do. In order that they do this, society needs to place more value on these activities.
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Not just read more but read what they want to read and enjoy it wanting more from the genre or genres they are interested in.
That is what I did once my mother taught me to read at home. When I was seven, my second year in first grade, my mother was told by “experts” that I was too retarded to learn to read and write.
Mom went to a “real” expert, the same first grade teacher I spent two years with and asked her what she could do at home. That teacher told my mother what to do at home and she followed through. It helped that both of my parents, high school dropouts during the Great Depression, were avid readers.
So, I learned to read. Decades later as a teacher myself, I learned I had a severe case of dyslexia. Something the so-called “experts” didn’t know about in the early 1950s.
By ten I was an avid reader: historical fiction, westerns, mysteries, thrillers, science fiction and fantasy were my passion. In high school I read two books a day that I wanted to read and ignored the schoolwork, which explains why I graduated with a 0.9 GPA.
After Vietnam and the Marines, I started college with help from the GI Bill and part-time jobs. Admin at the community college where I started must have seen my HS GPA and the comment in first grade that said I was too retarded to read and write and would not accepted me until I took a test to determine my reading level and what “bone” headed English classes I’d have to take to catch up before I could take any college level work.
That reading test revealed I was reading at a college level, and that happened because I read hundreds if not thousands of books before graduating from high school. Books I wanted to read. Not the assigned reading that my young dyslectic mind thought was as boring as waiting for salt to turn into sugar.
Guide children to love reading and they become lifelong learners and avid readers. Force them to learn how to read by reading boring material they are not interested is not going to work.
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Buy books for little children. Lots of them. Every child should have a little library of his or her own.
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“The Science of Reading”–#2 on their list-?! REALLY?! Diane, I searched your posts on the Science of Reading & they were not positive. One 1 of them, there was a little section whereby Rahm Emanuel touts the “Mississipi Miracle.” Let’s go with what ladyfair wrote, LCT wrote @ 2:04 PM, Arthur Camins &, YES–community schools (something Rahm understands zilch about, having closed 50 in Chicago).
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Retired,
You are right! I don’t believe there is a “science” of reading, any more than there is a science of math or a science of history. Kids learn to read in various ways. Everyone needs phonics. But that’s experience, not science.
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I should have thought the remarkable thing would be if reading were the one human activity that science could not investigate.
Mathematics is a formal science. That’s hardly controversial.
We can study how children learn to walk. We can study how they learn to talk. We can study how they learn to count. We can study how they learn to read.
That’s what science does. It studies things.
And of course children learn differently. Patients respond differently to medicines, too. That doesn’t mean there’s no science of medicine.
As for phonics being “experience, not science,” how do you suppose science works? We observe things, test our explanations, and see whether they hold up.
You can argue about what the science says. But it would be rather extraordinary if the human brain obeyed the laws of nature in everything except learning to read.
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The “science of reading” implies, believes, that there is one way to teach reading. Only one. And that’s not true.
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I can think of many, many human activities that can be studied without creating a “science” of how to act, do, feel. If humans were robots, it would be simple to design a science for their activities. We are not robots.
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As a retired teacher and teacher educator, I can attest to the fact that one of the first things prospective teachers are typically taught about is individual and group differences. That’s because not everyone or every group benefits optimally from being taught skills in various disciplines the same exact way.
What others have written here about their own experiences, like Lloyd, attest to that fact. Claiming that teaching and learning should be based solely on laws of nature for specific disciplines ignores the reality of diverse human nature which, most importantly, demands to be acknowledged and addressed.
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Lots of great points and suggestions here. leftcoastteacher really nails it, for me. As does the fact that poverty, hunger, and hopelessness are harbingers of failure.
You, Diane, have been reporting on the corporate dismantling of our excellent education system for decades, now. And I have been witness to it, as a teacher, that entire time.
Education, like health care, should NOT be profit driven. It should be a right and accessible to all.
We have seen deep pocketed non-educators:
> Create a “problem” in our system, engineered through test driven metrics that are flawed in their methods and conclusions.
Use that data to justify an “urgent need” for change.
Passed that flawed judgement on to major media outlets which, in turn, vilified teachers and created doubt within the populace on the proven system.
“Rebuild the airplane in midflight”. No input from experienced educators or child/teen psychologists. Pease give me a break: what a moronic solution.
And now they wonder what could possibly be the problem.
Capitalism gone awry would be one explanation.
Also:
My daughter teaches in an NYC high school. She and her co-teacher insist on hand written notes taken in class. And hand written essays written in class anlong with assignments. And they randomly question students about their assignments. AI is too good and too tempting for a teen who wants to do something else.
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<blockquote>”dianeravitchOctober 8, 2026 at 1:16 pmThe “science of reading” implies, believes, that there is one way to teach reading. Only one. And that’s not true.Liked by 1 person
dianeravitchOctober 8, 2026 at 1:19 pmI can think of many, many human activities that can be studied without creating a “science” of how to act, do, feel. If humans were robots, it would be simple to design a science for their activities. We are not robots.”</blockquote>
There is something almost sad about this argument, because the position it ends up defending is not the one it thinks it’s defending.
The claim that there is no “science of reading” because children learn differently would, if applied consistently, eliminate the science of medicine. Patients respond to treatments differently. That is not a reason to abandon clinical research. It is what clinical research exists to account for.
Three moves here, none of which engage the actual findings. It conflates reading as a subject with the scientific study of how reading is learned — these are different things. It substitutes a simpler version of the Science of Reading position — that there is one way to teach every child — for what the evidence actually claims, which is that most children need certain things. And it treats human variation as an argument against scientific inquiry, when variation is precisely what scientific inquiry is designed to study.
None of this protects children from rigid instruction. It just means the people doing the instructing don’t have to answer for whether it works.
The Science of Reading is compatible with individual differences, contextual judgment, and teacher expertise. It just asks that those things be informed by evidence rather than protected from it.
That seems like a reasonable thing to ask.
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Apparent,
Are you aware that “the science of reading” was give a $6 billion grant for implementation ina small set of schools as part of the original NCLB in early 2002? The implementation was vigorously evaluated and concluded that the students taught by SOR learned elements of reading well. But their comprehension skills were no better that those who were taught by other methods?
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In methods courses, teachers are prepared so that they can deal with the fact that there are not only individual differences between students, but also group differences. If we want to be able to reach everyone, that means there is not going to be just one right way to teach. For example, children in low income families are dealing with a lot of stresses that differ significantly from what kids in privileged families face and that means teachers must know many different strategies, including ways of understanding various family dynamics and effective ways of reaching out to help students and families.
I don’t know how doctors are trained, but I would be very surprised if they were taught to believe that all patients could be expected to respond to one kind of treatment and those for whom that does not work can just be left on their own until there are new accepted breakthroughs that can ensure their health and survival.
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I’m sorry, but unless you’re spent a few years in actual primary or secondary classrooms you can’t be an expert on that level of education.
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There are experts who study and write theories about fixing problems in specific industries, who never worked in that industry.
Then there are the experts who work in a specific industry for decades and become experts through experience and never ending learning about their industry.
Public Education is a publicly funded industry that provides educational services. Like teachers teaching students to learn specific skills and subjects in classrooms.
Pubic education is an industory that belongs to the public sector as a system of government-funded services, and being a classroom teacher functions as part of the broader educational services industry. [1, 2, 3]
Experienced public education teachers who learned how to teach while actively on the job are generally considered the better experts for practical, day-to-day classroom success. Teachers who developed their skills in the trenches understand the messy reality of a live classroom. They know how to handle 30 (more or less) unique personalities, sudden schedule disruptions, and varying emotional needs all at once. Their advice is built on what actually works in practice, not just what should work in theory.They understand the physical and mental fatigue of the profession, making their mentorship highly realistic and sustainable.
I don’t know about the other 49 states, but in 1983, in response to Reagan’s flawed, deliberately biased, and misleading ‘A Nation at Risk’ report, California’s legislature passed the Hughes-Hart Education Reform ACT (SM 813). Under this mandate, public school teachers were required to complete 150 clock hours of professional growth activities—which frequently included earning semester credits from college courses directly related to their taught subject matter—every five years to maintain (“keep”) their clear teaching credentials.
I was a public school teacher in California from 1975 to August 2005, when I retired.
Not all teaching credentials are equal. From what I’ve read and know from experience, the worst is earned through Teach for America. At least it was when I left in 2005. And the toughest is an Urban Residency program, which was how I earned my teaching credential.
In a few years, states with mandates like SM813 ended up with the most hands-on experts who were actually teaching full time.
Teachers in states with similar mandates that earned their credentials through an Urban Residency may be the pinnacle of experience and expertise in the classroom a few years after they start teaching and because of that mandate, continue to improve their skills and expertise.
No teachers I knew, including me, in the district where I taught for thirty years were asked asked how we taught and managed our classrooms. We were told from the top down what to do and how to teach using what was called the Whole Language Approach. In some cases forced with threats. I know. It happened to me. Once, I was called in to the principal’s office, because I wasn’t doing what they told us to do, and I was warned that if I didn’t do what I was told, I’d be fired.
I didn’t refuse publicly. I just ignored the mandates and kept teaching the way that worked for me and my students. Admin recruited students as spies to report back to find out if we were all teaching The Whole Language approach.
I knew it was wrong and I did not comply even after being warned, but I did come up with an underground, sneaky way to teach my students that worked.
A (lost) decade later, the results were in regarding The Whole Language approach and it was an total failure causing annual standardized test scores to drop drastically, for the teachers who did exactly what they were told.
My students soared, their average scores climbing up in the opposite direction. I only know this because Admin was using all the annual test results to determine the teachers with the most gains, and after that decade, we had a department meeting where a VP used on overhead to show a chart comparing every high school English teacher in the distract. At the bottom of each column on the chart was a number, not a name. Most of the columns looked like one to three story houses. One column looked like a hundred story high rise. The VP identified that one teacher. It was me, who refused to follow The Whole Language Approach 100% and who was threatened by the admin experts who never taught.
No one apologized for how us teachers were treated and bullied from the top down to do what most if not all of us through was wrong. And no admin ever asked to find out what my teaching and classroom maangment methods were.
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“Apparent,
Are you aware that “the science of reading” was give a $6 billion grant for implementation ina small set of schools as part of the original NCLB in early 2002? The implementation was vigorously evaluated and concluded that the students taught by SOR learned elements of reading well. But their comprehension skills were no better that those who were taught by other methods?”
It is a curious thing to blame the key for not being the house. The key never claimed to be the house. It claimed only that without it, you would be standing in the rain. That’s my whole argument, and since you’ve complained about length before, I could stop there.
But if you’d like it plainer: necessary but not sufficient. Children grasp the idea every time they say, “I put new batteries in, and it still won’t go.”
The study you’re describing is the 2008 Reading First Impact Study. First graders in Reading First schools decoded significantly better than first graders in comparison schools. On comprehension, the program showed no significant effect in any grade.
It’s an odd choice of witness. You’ve judged a body of research by a 2002 grant program while skipping the cases that test it directly (more on those later). A lawyer who calls only the witness who saw nothing, and leaves at home the ones who saw everything, should not be surprised when the jury wonders why. And as it happens, even your one witness testifies for the other side.
Here’s why, and it isn’t really arguable. But the education of children is a serious matter, so let’s get technical for a moment. This is one of the rare points in the field that can actually be nailed down.
Let D(x) mean child x can decode a text and C(x) mean x comprehends it. The science of reading asserts necessity, ∀x (C(x) → D(x)), not sufficiency, ∀x (D(x) → C(x)). Your evidence is ∃x (D(x) ∧ ¬C(x)). Since ¬(D → C) ≡ D ∧ ¬C, that evidence is equivalent to ¬∀x (D(x) → C(x)). It refutes sufficiency, and only sufficiency. It is consistent with necessity, because any x with D(x) true and C(x) false satisfies C(x) → D(x) vacuously. Refuting necessity would require ∃x (C(x) ∧ ¬D(x)), a child who comprehends text she cannot decode. Neither the study nor you offers one. The point holds at the group level too. Gough and Tunmer’s Simple View models comprehension as a product, R = D × LC, where LC is language comprehension. Raise D while LC stays low and R barely moves. A decoding gain with no comprehension gain is not an anomaly for the model. It is the model’s prediction.
Or, to put it another way: you have won a vigorous argument against an opponent who never showed up.
Spanish is spelled almost exactly as it sounds. An English speaker can learn its letter-sound rules in an afternoon and read a Madrid newspaper aloud, every word pronounced correctly. He won’t understand a sentence of it, because he lacks the vocabulary and the knowledge the words point to. That doesn’t make the afternoon a waste. It makes it essential. Without it, he can’t get a word off the page. Once he learns Spanish, every word he knows is open to him in print.
Reading First looks exactly like the man with the newspaper. The core programs it paid for taught vocabulary and comprehension largely as discrete skills, not as knowledge of the world. The children got the key and not much of a house.
Now, the witnesses you left at home:
And where those gains fade, as they have for Mississippi’s eighth graders, the cause is once again the key without the house.
For the record, then. It takes a moment to knock over a bookcase and an afternoon to reshelve it, so you’ll have to forgive the librarian for taking his time:
The science of reading has never said that a child who can read the words will understand them. It has said only that a child who can’t read the words will never get the chance. This is not dogma. It is the sort of thing a grandmother could have told you, and probably did.
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So in another decade, we should expect to see a national “miracle” on NAEP reading scores, if you are right. I hope I am here to see it.
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A lot of sound signifying nothing — your post, and your argument.
“The science of reading has never said that a child who can read the words will understand them. It has said only that a child who can’t read the words will never get the chance.” Decoding/ being able to pronounce [speak in one’s head or aloud] a written word is not “the key,” it’s the knock at the door. Decoding without understanding word-meaning is empty. It’s neither one nor the other, the process combines the two activities. Phonics (or simply ‘sounding the word out’ as my generation was taught at mom’s knee/ in K-1) was always part of the process.
Some students (a)arrive at K/1 with zero reading exposure, and need a structured phonics program with repetitive exercise (ensuring comprehension as they go). Some (b) catch on to the phonetic element instinctively, perhaps with a little prompting, at PreK age, simply with lots of reading aloud at home (and at PreK), with just a few prompts like big books for sharing, while teacher runs finger under text, stopping at each word– and/ or reads the same story often, and/or reads other stories featuring same vocabulary.
The gross error of Whole Language was in assuming all kids were group (b)– that everyone could learn that way. They compounded the error by assuming they understood the details of how group (b) accomplished that, coming up with absurd, unproven breakdown into discrete ‘skills’ such as “3-cueing,’ which they proceeded to teach as method. They eliminated even the most basic [sans structuring around phonemes et al] practice of ‘sounding the word out.’
I wouldn’t be surprised if SOR texts in teachers college present method variations/ using all tools in the toolkit as appropriate to student. But your rosy picture ignores what happens in the ed industry that boils bona fide ed sources/ research down to simplistic formulaic exercises that eliminate everything but easily-worksheeted/ testable bits to be used in the trenches. Which then are imposed on teachers by admins, and teachers monitored to ensure they’re doing per [unenlightened] district instructions.
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Ginny, you are a gem.
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I’m baffled about what we disagree on.
You say decoding without word meaning is empty. Agreed. That’s what my line said: the science of reading never claimed a child who can read the words will understand them. It claimed only that a child who can’t read them never gets the chance. Necessary, not sufficient. (Formally: I said ¬D → ¬C, no decoding means no comprehension. You’re rebutting D → C, decoding guarantees comprehension. Those are different claims, and I made only the first.) If you’d rather call decoding the knock at the door than the key, fine with me. It’s the same thing to me.
“It’s neither one nor the other, the process combines the two” is also the science of reading. Gough and Tunmer put it in 1986 as the Simple View of Reading: comprehension equals decoding times language comprehension. If either factor is zero, the product is zero. That’s the field’s founding model, not an objection to it.
On Whole Language, you’re right, and I’d go further. Three-cueing wasn’t just unproven. It taught children to guess from pictures and context, which is the habit of a struggling reader, and called it a strategy. That damage took decades to surface in test scores.
One thing doesn’t add up, though. You say sounding words out “was always part of the process,” then that Whole Language “eliminated even the most basic practice of ‘sounding the word out.’” (P ∧ ¬P.) It can’t be both. The second version is the accurate one, and it’s the reason the science of reading movement exists.
Your strongest point is the last one, and I share it. Districts can turn good research into worksheet drills, decodable-text overload and pacing guides that skip vocabulary and background knowledge. That’s a real risk, and some rollouts are already showing it. But it’s an argument about implementation, not about the science. It’s the same thing that happened to Whole Language. The fix is to hold districts to the research, not to doubt the research.
So: decoding is necessary, comprehension is the goal, Whole Language failed kids, and bureaucracies can wreck anything. Which of those do you think I got wrong?
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Great reply, thank you. I think the element you’re missing is one all teachers deplore. Good, reliable educational research is ignored by the ed-industry, which is for-profit. They grab a little piece of a study that has gotten national attention– ignoring whatever can’t be boiled down into dumbed-down, easily-sold “do this in x easy steps”– and convert it into ed-packages ready for consumption by school/ state admins– claiming imprimatur of ed studies whose arguments/ conclusions are not in fact implemented in their materials at all.
Big picture: this is a consquence of privatizing public goods– like K12 ed.
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Sorry, I forgot tp respond to one point in your reply that starts ” I’m baffled.” Re: “You say sounding words out “was always part of the process,” then that Whole Language “eliminated even the most basic practice of ‘sounding the word out.”
Correct. The point is that Whole Language didn’t sweep the whole nation. In states such as mine [NJ]– & no doubt others– though Whole Language was supposedly the way to go, districts didn’t necessarily go along [mine certainly didn’t], and (from what I’ve read/ learned on ed forums), veteran teachers continued to do what they’d always done regardless (which absolutely included ‘sounding words out’). If I may say so without sounding like a bigot, the tendency to follow top-down implementation of Whole Language methods– sans any “sounding words out”– was most prevalent in mostly-Southern states, that didn’t have any structured reading instructiopn standards to start with.
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As Reagan would say, there you go again. Last time it was “one way to teach.” This time it’s “miracle.” Neither is my word.
Still, it’s a testable prediction, which is more than this thread usually produces. But a national average blends the states that teach reading well with the ones that don’t, so it will move slowly and prove little either way. Waiting ten years for that number is a way of not looking at the ones we already have.
Steubenville, a poor Rust Belt city, has used the same structured reading program for 25 years, and nearly all of its third graders read proficiently. Mississippi, Louisiana, and England have all shown progress. Where gains fade, as Mississippi’s have by eighth grade, the likeliest reason is that decoding wasn’t paired with knowledge. The key without the house.
California shows the other side. In 2024, the California Reading Coalition found that 44 percent of districts using Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study landed in the state’s lowest-achieving fifth, even though half of those districts serve some of the fewest high-need students. That same year, fewer than 2 percent of our districts used programs that teach both decoding and background knowledge.
So maybe we stop arguing ideology. Todd Collins of the California Reading Coalition has proposed a simple test: what delivers the best results for low-income students? Those are the children whose parents can offer the least help at home, so their scores show most clearly what the curriculum itself is doing. It’s also the most equitable test there is.
Find out who delivers. Find out what they use. Then copy it, shamelessly. It won’t take a miracle. Just common sense.
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Curriculum does not learn.
A public education curriculum is the planned and structured roadmap of what students should learn, how they are taught, and how their progress is measured in a public school system
Teacher planning is part of the curriculum they use to guide their teaching.
Teachers cannot learn for their students.
The students have to do the learning.
Parental support helps learning to take place too.
No matter how good the teacher is, their lesson plans and the curriculum, unless the student pays attention, cooperates and does the work, little or no learning take place.
This is where classroom management comes in. Curriculum has nothing to do with classroom management. A teacher who cannot manage their students (control their behavior) cannot teach.
Chaotic classrooms do not offer a proper learning environment.
I taught for thirty years in public school with child poverty rated starting at 70% and up. I earned my teaching credential through a yearlong Urban Residency program out of Cal Poly Pomona, where I learned how to manage a classroom full of students from a master teacher.
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We’ve traveled similar paths on opposite coastlines, Lloyd.
I taught Inner city kids for my entire career. Most were from impoverished families. I remember one meeting where the parents said they watched tv and ate their meals sitting on the floor for fear of random gunshots through the windows from the rival gangs in the area.
My kids felt welcome and safe in my classroom. I was fortunate to start my career with a lot of autonomy. The admins offered a lot of excellent afterschool training sessions in how to structure and make the class interesting to our population. It worked.
Things got tough when the mandates came down from atop Mt Olympus. I got my first “U” on an observation because my mini lesson was 2 minutes too long. And when I was caught teaching the newly banned (and highly effective) remedial reading course with books I had salvaged and made copies from, I was told by an administrator that if I didn’t stop immediately, she would personally burn the books.
Water under the bridge and it just keeps recycling.
My daughter teaches American Politics and Economics to seniors in a magnet high school. Has a home room class, too. Started as freshmen and now they’re juniors. Kids from all walks. Classroom management skills are an absolute must…and it’s not a science. Theories will only get you so far.
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One teacher I’ll call by her first letter, Ms. O, lived a few blocks from the high school where she taught with her husband (We taught in the same HS and department, what’s called English). Their house was on the wrong side of the high school where the poverty and street gangs were entrenched. Their house was shot up a few times. Still, they refused to move and even after her husband died, she stayed put until after she retired and then moved to Las Vegas to live with her sister. Ms. O talked about waking up to flat tires for the car in the driveway. She was tough!
West and north of the high school were older, smaller homes with poverty and violent street gangs.
East and south were middle class homes from newer develops that built right up to the barrio. The few connecting streets between the old and new ended up having walls built across the streets so there ws no through traffic. The walls were built to make it more difficult for the gangsters and taggers to drive into the newer middle-class homes where most of the Asians and Whites lived. Mostly Latino and Hispanic in the barro with some Asians and few of any blacks (8% of students in 2005) who most living in the middle-class area.
In 2005, only 8% of the HS student population was white. A few years ago, out of curiously I check the most recent HS report card online and there were no more white students.
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Gentrification failed…? Serious business. Oakland?
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La Puente, Southern California, San Gabriel Valley
There’s been no attempt to gentrify the old barrio with generational gangs and poverty. Those homes are smaller and were probably built in the 1950s and 1960s. This land was pretty much flat.
The newer middle-class homes were built on hilly land that was once a cattle ranch. Those developments spread east and south from the high school, were being built in the 1970s into the 1990s. Not all of the newer homes were in Rowland Unified. Some of them were in West Covina, Walnut, Diamond Bar, et al.
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Now this is interesting.
What would make the difference between the ongoing gentrification of Bed Stuy and Crown Heights in Brooklyn, NY vs San Gabriel Valley, CA, where gentrification has failed?
Is it the physical geography of valley vs hills (cool slant)? Is it Hispanic vs African American? NYC vs Southern California? Or a combo of alll?
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A combo of all in addition to entrenched poverty alongside mutli- generational street gangs.
The dominant street gang in the La Puente and surrounding Rowland Unified School District community is Puente 13 (also known as P13), according to law enforcement records and federal indictments. [1, 2]. They were there along with smaller youth gangs that were at war with each other and P13) in 1975 when I started earning my Urban Residency teaching credential through Cal Poly Pomana. Yorbita was a grade school that fed into the high school where I’d teach for the last 16 of 30 years.
After earning the credential, I subbed my second year and ended up with a long term at another grade school that fed into Nogales High School. This school was in the bloody heart of contested gang territory. Graffiti everywhere. Concertina where strung along the eaves of that school’s roofs to keep gangs from easily gaining access to the roofs where they’d use axes to chop through the roof and get inside the loot and destroy.
The local police from more than one town wouldn’t patrol the streets in that area at night. Too dangerous. Child snipers! Rowlans Unified was spread across several towns in the San Gabriel Valley. Nogales High school by itself sat on land that occupied areas in three of those towns. I only remember one of the three towns working with and cooperating with the high school to assist in maintaining peace between all the gangs we taught.
The gang riots ended when that city started sending squad cars onto the campus to sit in the grass by the library watching the quad where students ate lunch. All the HS admins were on duty. the student lunch area keeping the gangs in their own spots so they wouldn’t share borders and lite a riot.
We had Asian gangs, Latino/Hispanic gangs, Black gangs, white gangs and a lot of students that didn’t belong to any of the gangs.
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Lloyd, I agree with nearly everything you wrote. Students do the learning. Management comes first. A chaotic room teaches nothing. Thirty years in high-poverty classrooms taught you that, and I won’t argue with it.
But it doesn’t answer my point. It moves past it.
Your argument is that because learning depends on things curriculum can’t touch, curriculum doesn’t matter much. Spelled out, that’s:
Let L = learning, M = classroom management, K = effective curriculum.
You’ve shown: ¬M → ¬L.
I’ve argued: ¬K → ¬L.
Those don’t conflict. Learning needs both: L → (M ∧ K).
To get from your premise to your conclusion, you’d need M → L: management alone is enough. Nobody believes that, including, I’d bet, you.
Widening the frame until the original question looks small works in any argument. Poverty shapes health outcomes more than any hospital does. That doesn’t make hand-washing protocols pointless. When the big cause is out of your hands, the controllable factors matter more, not less. A school can’t end poverty this year. It can choose what to put in front of a six-year-old on Monday.
That choice shows up in results. Steubenville’s teachers face the same poverty you did, and nearly all its third graders read proficiently. California districts using Units of Study land disproportionately in the bottom fifth, even ones serving fewer high-need kids. Same management problems, same poverty, different curriculum, different outcomes.
A great teacher with a weak curriculum is a virtuoso with an out-of-tune violin. You’ll still hear the talent. You’ll also hear every wrong note. Why make the best teachers work against their instruments?
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I learned how human memory works. I learned how children do not all learn the same way. I planned my lessons accordingly. That worked.
In Finland, they let the teachers decide what works and how to teach. That’s what I think works best.
Their teachers learn about all the choices and then make the final decisions to fit how they teacher, how they manage and how their students learn and adapt and adjust when needed.
I also managed my classroom’s like a Marine Drill Instructor. It isn’t easy to learn without discipline.
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Lloyd, Your “I also managed my classrooms like a Marine Drill Instructor. It isn’t easy to learn without discipline” comment makes a lot of sense for high poverty secondary students studying English.
The need differed for my high poverty PreSchool and Kindergarten students, in the most diverse area of my city, who were mostly new immigrants and just learning to speak English (through total immersion). So I encouraged parents to watch Sesame Street with their kids at home because, I said, “I speak TV.” The children also watched it in class. And most (both parents and children) learned to speak rather quickly.
For when the children became too vocal and loud, I created this sing-song little ditty:
Sh, be quiet, the noise can hurt our ears.
Sh, be quiet, the noise can hurt our heads.
It can hurt our ears, it can hurt our heads,
It can make us nervous and upset,
Let’s keep it down to a quiet sound,
SH pass it around…
(whispering)
Sh be quiet, the noise can hurt our ears,
Sh, be quiet, the noise can hurt our heads…
At the time, I was completing my second college degree, in the University Without Walls program, and when my professor came to observe me in my class and saw us singing that, she asked me to teach it to students in traditional Teacher Education college classes for prospective Early Childhood and primary Elementary Ed teachers.
As I told them then, “You have to do what you’ve got to do and tailor it to the population at hand…”
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I apologize for any errors, such as misspellings and inappropriate bolding. I have been dealing with the ramifications of excruciatingly painful kidney stones on my own for quite awhile now, primarily due to health insurance issues that have prevented me from getting appropriate medical assistance, so I’ve not been able to function at 100% and hope you will understand.
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OMG, I couldn’t believe CA was still using Lucy Calkins readers in 2024?! So I had to read up. I was relieved to learn that only about 1/3 of US classrooms were sold on this method [2000s & 2010s]. Certainly never saw anything like it in our district when my kids were in early grades [’90s], tho I read that that was the era when her approach began gaining wide popularity. We dodged a bullet.
Supposedly, NJ districts in the ’90s already heavily favored “whole language” method [which set the stage for Calkins’ branded formal reading curriculum of the 2000s], but it wasn’t used on our kids.
Luckily, in NJ, school districts have great flexibility in choosing their curriculum, and state has a light hand. [Even new ed stds promulgated by state have to have school bd/ public approval & be signed off by Supt to be implemented.] Our district developed its own writing instruction program, e.g., in the ’90s, formed & sequenced thro collaboration of all levels of K12 teachers under guidance of district ELA dept heads, regularly updated. My kids– regular achievers here, not stars– were shocked when entering NJ state college as freshmen to realize the advantage they had in writing proficiency compared to peers.
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“OMG, I couldn’t believe CA was still using Lucy Calkins readers in 2024?! So I had to read up. I was relieved to learn that only about 1/3 of US classrooms were sold on this method [2000s & 2010s]”
Yes.
My local public school district still does, and as a local taxpayer I’m paying for it.
What do you suggest I do about it?
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Just make sure they’re also teaching phonics. And see if they’re using invented spelling to teach writing. Lucy caulkins work is very good.
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I decided to fact check this, and learned that Lucy Calkin’s Units of Study isn’t used in California’s public schools as wide as one might think.
“Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study is listed among the prevalent K–5 English Language Arts (ELA) supplementary or core curricula used across California’s 937 school districts, though it is far less dominant than state-adopted basal programs like McGraw Hill Wonders or Benchmark Advance.”
https://www.careads.org/curric-report
“Despite ‘local control,’ 81% of districts use one of just three reading programs: McGraw Hill’s Wonders, Benchmark’s Advance, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Journeys. Wonders and Advance alone are used by 72% of districts.”
“Fewer than 2% of districts use programs generally viewed as following the science of reading, including the building of background knowledge, such as those identified by the Knowledge Matters Campaign.”
“The one exception is Heinemann’s Teachers College Units of Study (often referred to by its author, Lucy Calkins). Forty-four percent of districts using Calkins were in the lowest-achieving quintile of all California districts*, especially surprising since half of Calkins’ districts have among the fewest high-need students. This program has received significant negative attention in the past few years, including the lowest rating from EdReports.”
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I taught PreSchool and Kindergarten for decades and my students learned to read, comprehend and write through a very eclectic approach. That included Phonological Awareness, Phonics, Whole Language, Sight Words, a lot of different kinds of literature, from classic children’s stories to big books to poetry, children’s dictionaries and encyclopedias, to phone books to menus to recipes, to the Rules of the Road and basal readers, as well as many different games, writing and illustrating daily journals, writing group poems and lyrics for music, using a typewriter, computer keyboards and Alphabits Cereal– virtually nothing was off the table.
I frequently herd from 1st Grade teachers asking if I could send them more of my students because they were so impressed with how well my kids could read, comprehend and write AND how much they loved school…
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What’s so sad about this is that many would see this as “old school”. Like it “was”worked” in a previous era.
But, people: it really DOES work!
The teacher gets to know the kids and, with the knowledge they’ve gained through experience; they reach them.
And, if the teacher is lost; they ask and use advice from their mentors and peers.
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“No teachers I knew, including me, in the district where I taught for thirty years were asked asked how we taught and managed our classrooms. We were told from the top down what to do and how to teach using what was called the Whole Language Approach. In some cases forced with threats. I know. It happened to me. Once, I was called in to the principal’s office, because I wasn’t doing what they told us to do, and I was warned that if I didn’t do what I was told, I’d be fired.
I didn’t refuse publicly. I just ignored the mandates and kept teaching the way that worked for me and my students. Admin recruited students as spies to report back to find out if we were all teaching The Whole Language approach.
I knew it was wrong and I did not comply even after being warned, but I did come up with an underground, sneaky way to teach my students that worked.
A (lost) decade later, the results were in regarding The Whole Language approach and it was an total failure causing annual standardized test scores to drop drastically, for the teachers who did exactly what they were told.”
Lloyd, one more thing. I think your story may say more than my arguments, but it’s all I’ve been trying to argue.
You refused to follow a Whole Language mandate, even after you were warned you could be fired. A decade later, the district’s own chart showed your students’ gains far ahead of everyone else’s. Same school, same students, same poverty, one teacher doing something different. I can’t think of a better case in this thread for the idea that how we teach matters.
Your own reading story points the same way. A first-grade teacher told your mother what to do at home, your mother followed through, and you learned to read. Then you read hundreds of books because you loved them.
That mirrors my own experience. I learned to decode first, and after that I read whatever I wanted. The difference is that I learned at school, not at home. I was lucky to have teachers who taught it. A lot of kids aren’t.
So I agree that children should read what they love. That’s the goal. I’d just say that free choice reading is the reward of decoding, not a substitute for it. (Formally: comprehension requires decoding, C → D. Your story and mine both fit it. Neither of us got to the books we loved any other way.)
If you’re dyslexic, the order matters even more. Children with dyslexia were among those Whole Language failed most, because guessing from pictures and context is what they fall back on when the code isn’t taught directly. Much of the research behind the science of reading began with kids like you.
So I suspect we agree on more than this thread suggests. You defied Whole Language, and it worked.
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I would defy the so-called “Science of Reading” too.
Teaching children to read using only phonics does not work for every child, especially those with conditions like dyslexia or ADHD, English language learners, or students who struggle with rigid, narrow decoding drills.
What Works Better: A Balanced, Multi-Strategy Approach
Effective reading instruction typically combines explicit decoding with broader language and comprehension skills. A comprehensive approach includes: [1, 2]
Phonics did not work for me, and I have dyslexia (the experts didn’t know about that then) so severe, when I was seven, my mother was told I’d never learn to read and write. Desperate, since my older brother (12 years older and she’d been told the same thing about him at my age and did nothing — just gave up), who was illiterate and in prison at the time. Mom went to my first-grade teacher and sked what she could do at home, and the advice didn’t include phonics. It was what worked” “A Balanced multi-stagey approach”.
I still have dyslexia, which is why so many typos escape my attempt to catch them all.
This little comment boxes do not help.
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Lloyd, I’d never tell you not to rebel. Given my own experience as a parent, I wish more teachers did, and more loudly. That’s not a demand or a grievance, just a wish. I recognize that in any organization, speaking out against the plan can carry a cost many people can’t pay. You know that better than most. More on that later.
But the core principles of the science of reading line up with what you’ve said. Phonemic awareness and phonics, taught so they don’t become dry, isolated drills. Vocabulary and comprehension built through read-alouds, discussion and rich stories. Fluency. Multisensory work connecting sound, sight and handwriting, which comes from the Orton-Gillingham tradition built for dyslexic children. That’s your list, and it’s theirs. I suspect you’ll push against particular implementations. That’s a good instinct in any profession, since the tension between standards and discretion is almost a necessary part of any practice that can be called a profession.
Look at Scarborough’s Reading Rope, which is about as close to a core diagram as the science of reading has. It has two strands. One is word recognition: phonological awareness, decoding, and recognizing familiar words on sight. The other is language comprehension: background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning and familiarity with print. Over time the strands twist together into skilled reading. Nobody serious argues for “only phonics.” A district that mandated phonics drills and nothing else would be cutting the rope in half. The difference from balanced literacy isn’t the ingredients. It’s that the code is taught systematically and explicitly, and guessing from pictures isn’t taught as a strategy.
I’m sorry it took what it did for you to learn to read. My own child struggled too, in a Units of Study district. Some of the practices baffled me, but I trusted them. I learned not to. In the end I took my kid to tutoring grounded in the principles you’ve just outlined.
Eventually I moved my children out of public school. I know how that sounds here. A lot of people assume families leave for ideological reasons, which makes things easy. Reality isn’t easy. Families leave because they don’t have the resources to make the school schedule work, because the reading curriculum isn’t aligned with best practices, because of, yes, travel sports. It isn’t ideology all the way down. Now I look at the public school across the street, the one my tax dollars pay for. About 50 yards from my house is a reading tutoring center, and parents bring their kids there every day. So it goes.
I wish someone had clued me in earlier, and I wish more teachers had spoken up. No one at my kids’ schools ever mentioned that how to teach reading was a live controversy, or that there was solid evidence against the approach they were using. And no school has much incentive to suggest outside help, since recommending it can create an obligation to provide it. I can’t go back.
I did check my district’s reading scores. As I expected, low-income students and students of color do worse, and worse than the state average for the same groups. The California Reading Coalition’s curriculum report is worth a look: https://www.careads.org/curric-report. Its most striking finding is that districts using Units of Study, the program my kids had, were heavily overrepresented among the state’s lowest performers, even though half of them serve relatively few high-need students. Fewer than 2 percent of California districts use programs built on the science of reading. You can check the numbers yourself.
I told my school board that, and more. Maybe they’ll act, maybe they won’t. It is what it is.
As for teacher flexibility, I won’t offer a slogan that will win the room. Every mature profession has to hold standards and discretion together, and “balance” is never the right word. They pull against each other. What holds them is a structure built across the tension.
Medicine: a simple checklist for inserting central lines cut infections by about two-thirds in Michigan ICUs. But no checklist can tell a doctor what to do when a patient’s three conditions call for treatments that conflict. Someone has to judge.
Aviation: the preflight checklist was born in 1935, when a Boeing prototype crashed because an experienced crew forgot to release a control lock. Pilots still run checklists on every flight. But when Sully Sullenberger lost both engines over the Hudson, the checklist assumed a plane at a far higher altitude. He had seconds to decide what to keep and what to skip.
It feels like there are two sides in this thread, each hoping to win, with this room clearly in one camp. That’s okay. But on standards versus discretion, accepting that nobody wins has to be on the table too. The tension doesn’t get settled. It gets managed, case by case, by people who respect both sides of it. That will never be a rallying cry. So be it.
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Thank you for your comments. Very well reasoned. I have two concerns though as a reading teacher. 1. I don’t believe units of study has anything to do with phonics. I never liked it because it’s very structured and kind of bossy but I don’t think it is anything to do with phonics, unless that changed over time. And 2, nobody ever had kids just wildly guessing words. The idea might be to guess if you didn’t know and then to check so if you said pony and the word was actually a horse, you would go back and check the first sound and soon realized that your guess couldn’t be true. All teachers did some version of that at times. I’ve never seen a teacher who thought the idea was to just wildly guess and I don’t think that whole language approach ever suggested plain old guessing. That idea comes from the very poor reporting of things like sold a story.
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Cindy, thank you. I appreciate the thoughtful response, particularly from someone who has taught reading.
On Units of Study, I think you may be remembering an earlier version or the writing curriculum. Calkins and her colleagues introduced Units of Study in Phonics beginning in 2018. More importantly, EdReports evaluated the 2018 reading materials and found that the K–2 curriculum relied on meaning, syntax and visual cues to teach reading, while lacking a coherent sequence for systematic, explicit phonics instruction. That’s an independent curriculum review, not a characterization from Sold a Story.
On guessing, I think your example actually gets to the heart of the disagreement. Nobody is suggesting teachers encouraged children to make random guesses. Three-cueing was a structured strategy: use context or pictures to predict a word, then check whether the letters seem to fit. Your example of guessing “pony” and checking its initial sound against “horse” illustrates that approach rather well.
The problem is that checking a guess against the first letter isn’t the same thing as decoding the word. And teaching children to identify words through context, then verify, isn’t the same thing as teaching them to identify words through their spelling, then use context to understand what they’ve read.
This isn’t a controversy invented by a podcast. The National Reading Panel established the benefits of systematic phonics instruction more than two decades ago.
None of this means teachers were careless or acted in bad faith. Quite the contrary. Many were using the methods they had been taught, often with great dedication. But good intentions and professional experience can’t settle an empirical question. That’s what evidence is for.
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Thank you for the clarity on units of study – i had been puzzled. and thank you for the civility of your reply. As far as doing what you were taught, i think that’s where one problem lies. Teachers with good support and a chance to talk with their peers rarely “follow” what they’ve been taught. They add and subtract, learn from others, and change. They don’t start knowing how to teach reading or anything else. And actually they don’t finish by knowing either. They keep learning as they go if… they are allowed to make decisions, evaluate them with others and with new information, think and not follow.
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“I decided to fact check this, and learned that Lucy Calkin’s Units of Study isn’t used in California’s public schools as wide as one might think.”
Respectfully, it’s used in my local public school district, in California, to this day, and, for what it’s worth, I’ve pushed back agaisnt that, with our school board.
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The pull quotes I included with links did mention some district in the state still use it. It is not mandated by the state. If the district you teach in still uses it, that may because of the elected school board.
When I was teaching in Rowland Unified in California (1975 – 2005), the local teacher union for the district went all out to get rid of misguided and willingly ignorant school b9oard members and replace them with new people who knew better.
This is a never-ending battle for teachers and their local union branches:
Still, there is opposition to fight the never-ending creep to the right that led to Trump and his toxic MAGA Regime
I hope you have an active local. The local teachers’ union for Rowland was sometimes led by teachers who didn’t want to make waves, and we had to get rid of them too, and replace them with someone willing to fight back.
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Respectfully, your comment is extremely confusing to me.
I have plenty of criticisms of Units of Study, but linking to Moms for Liberty and extremist militias is not a critique I think that I can support with any facts that I’m aware of.
Units of Study, through its publisher, Heimean, is tied to Veritas Capital, which has deep ties to the military industrial complex and, in fact, owns a vendor that is key to Homeland Security and ICE’s information technology system. That’s all public record.
But I know of no links to any of the organizations you named in your comment. Nor do I think those who run Heimenan are particularly sympathetic to the ring wing groups you just named.
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