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HICKORY, N.C. – “Mmm, ah, tuh.” Maria Creger gestured at the letters on a small whiteboard as two of her second grade students sounded out the word “mat.”

Normally, she would observe the way their mouths move to form the letters. But this fall, everyone at Viewmont Elementary School is in masks, so she has to listen more intently than usual.

She erased the “m” and jotted down a “p.”

 “Cat,” a boy in a Lego shirt said.

“Did you just say ‘cuh?’ ” Creger asked him. “I heard you say ‘cuh.’ What sound is this?” She pointed to the “p” again.

“Puh,” he enunciated. “Pat.”

“What we have learned with our kids is we have to be incredibly explicit with everything we do.”

Erin Roberts, a teacher leadership specialist

Creger was showing the students how to read by using phonics, which teaches children the relationships between letters and sounds. It is a research-based approach that experts say is essential for helping children — especially those who struggle — learn to read.

Some teachers in Hickory Public Schools, where Viewmont Elementary is located, have been focusing more on the science of reading in recent years, spurred in part by the influence of a local education college. It is paying off: Over a five-year span ending in 2019, the number of students reading at grade level in the district grew at a rate that outpaced the state as a whole.

Elsewhere in North Carolina, or in any other state in the nation, if you step into an elementary school, you might find three different classrooms teaching students three different ways to read. For decades, administrators and teacher preparation programs have trained teachers in a patchwork of approaches that experts say is one of the main reasons American students are behind in literacy.

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In North Carolina, reading scores barely budged in the five years between 2015 and 2019. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showed one-third of fourth graders in the state performing below the basic reading level in 2019.

Jenny Muñoz does a small-group reading session in her second grade dual-immersion Spanish class at Southwest Primary School in Hickory, N.C. Credit: Ariel Gilreath for The Hechinger Report

A new law in North Carolina aims to fix the problem by bringing uniformity to reading instruction. The law, which passed this spring, will require educators in elementary schools and students and faculty in higher education programs to learn how to teach reading the way Maria Creger does.

Hickory’s scores improved from 52 percent of students reading at grade level in 2015 to 59 percent in 2019, compared with an increase from 56 percent to 57 percent for the state as a whole.

The state will be retraining teachers with a program called Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS), a method used by the one state that saw significant gains on the last NAEP tests: Mississippi.

Related: What parents need to know about the research on how kids learn to read

In 2019, Mississippi made headlines when results from standardized tests showed it was No. 1 in the nation for growth in reading. In 2013, Mississippi passed a law to use science-based instruction to ensure students read at or above grade level by the end of third grade. Students in the state improved year after year after that, even as the nation’s average reading scores declined.

Legislators are hoping to emulate Mississippi’s success, at a time when early data shows the school disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic have made North Carolina’s reading problem worse.

Hank Weddington, dean of the college of education at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, calls the effort “a civil rights issue.”

Forty percent of Black students and 44 percent of Hispanic students in North Carolina performed at grade level in English language arts and reading in 2019, compared with 70 percent of white students.

“We know that African American and Latinx students are performing worse in reading on end-of-grade test measures,” Weddington said. “That gap still exists here, and one of the reasons we believe the gap exists is because we have not been true to the science of reading.”

Teaching students to read is one of the most difficult tasks for an early elementary school teacher.

The latest data shows only 35 percent of fourth graders in the United States were proficient in reading in 2019. After fourth grade, students have a much harder time staying on track in school if they are not reading at grade level, because by that point, they are primarily reading to learn rather than learning to read.

The science of reading is a decades-old approach that says instruction should be extremely explicit because reading is not instinctive, like speech.

“Institutions of higher education don’t always teach the students how to teach reading.”

Shawn Clemons, director of accountability at Hickory Public Schools

Reading experts now widely acknowledge that before students can learn to connect sounds with written symbols, they must learn how to identify and manipulate those sounds with their mouths — an ability called phonemic awareness. Only then can students master phonics. From there, students must learn vocabulary and how to recognize words by sight — called orthographic mapping — as well as comprehend the meaning of the words they’re reading.

It sounds complicated because it is. Educators can be good at teaching and bad at teaching reading, said Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), an advocacy group that studies teacher preparation.

Related: Why reading comprehension is deteriorating

There are several reasons for this, Walsh said. Some educators think they are teaching science-based approaches when they are not. Others have been taught a different approach, known as whole language, which focuses more on context and meaning and exposing students to books rather than teaching phonics.

More commonly, teachers learn a method called balanced literacy, which combines both approaches. But balanced literacy often lacks enough explicit, rigorous phonemic instruction and can include strategies that hurt struggling readers rather than help them, such as teaching them to use pictures to figure out words they don’t know.

Walsh put it this way: In whole language and balanced literacy, a student could see the word “horse” under a photo and still get the exercise correct by calling it a pony.

 “When you have entire generations of teachers who have been taught that that’s OK, it is no wonder that kids leave third grade still unable to decode a word,” Walsh said.

Whether educators can effectively teach reading often depends on how they were taught in college. It’s more important than the curriculum they use, said Shawn Clemons, the director of accountability at Hickory Public Schools.

“Institutions of higher education don’t always teach the students how to teach reading,” Clemons said.

Of the roughly 1,100 teacher preparation programs in early reading NCTQ studies, only 18 do it right, according to Walsh. Lenoir-Rhyne University is one of them.

A second grade student goes over sight words at Viewmont Elementary School in Hickory, N.C. Credit: Ariel Gilreath for The Hechinger Report

Lenoir-Rhyne, a small school with about 100 undergraduate education students, has been teaching the science of reading for decades, according to Weddington, dean of the college of education.

But in recent years, that focus has expanded. As a result, Lenoir-Rhyne was among the schools  receiving the highest mark in 2020 in NCTQ’s rating system for teacher prep programs in early reading.

Students at Lenoir-Rhyne now spend three semesters learning about the science of reading rather than one, and professors have started teaching the neuroscience behind the research to give students a better understanding of why it is incredibly difficult for many children to learn to read.

“It is such a complex task, and for our students to understand why that is so complex and what the brain does is extremely important,” said Monica Campbell, who runs the reading program in Lenoir-Rhyne’s elementary education department.

During the three semesters when Lenoir-Rhyne students get instruction on teaching reading, they are also inside local elementary schools tutoring young children. Administrators said the tutoring — which was going on even before the lab opened — is part of why some schools in Hickory are seeing more success in reading.

Two years ago, the university created a literacy lab at Southwest Primary School, a few miles down the road from Viewmont Elementary in Hickory. Early education juniors and seniors go there twice a week for two of their courses.

Southwest Primary is a diverse school. About 30 percent of students are white, 26 percent are Black, 24 percent are Hispanic and 12 percent are Asian. More than 90 percent of students receive free or reduced-price lunch.

A group of kindergarten students listen during Jennifer Lee’s reading lesson at Southwest Primary School in Hickory, N.C. Credit: Ariel Gilreath for The Hechinger Report

Southwest Primary was an elementary school until 2017, when the district converted it to serve pre-K through second grade students, at the same time turning nearby Longview Elementary into a school for third through fifth grades only. The purpose of the change was to improve dismal reading scores.

At the same time, Southwest started using the science of reading approach, because balanced literacy was not working for its students, said Erin Roberts, a teacher leadership specialist at the school.

“What we have learned with our kids is we have to be incredibly explicit with everything we do,” Roberts said.

Related: Four things you need to know about the new reading wars

Last year, Lenoir-Rhyne students worked with 14 kindergartners at the school to improve their reading scores. By the end of the tutoring sessions, 12 had reached or exceeded grade level on their reading benchmark tests.

Those improvements persist even when the students leave Southwest Primary after second grade and head to Longview Elementary for third grade. Longview’s state rating went from a D in 2015 to a B in 2019, during the same time period Southwest started intensifying its reading instruction. Students reading at grade level rose from 44 percent to nearly 55 percent, according to state test results.

“A school like Longview, which has a lot of students that are economically disadvantaged, high-needs students, you don’t often see those schools with a performance grade that high,” said Clemons, the Hickory schools director of accountability. “That is a testament to what is done here, and it continues on to that next school.”

A second grader writes the word “mat” on a handheld whiteboard during a phonics lesson at Viewmont Elementary School in Hickory, N.C. Credit: Ariel Gilreath for The Hechinger Report

Campbell, who runs the Lenoir-Rhyne literacy lab, said partnering with local schools does not always work as well as it has with Southwest.

Even in Hickory, not all schools have committed to the science of reading. The district’s official approach is balanced literacy.

When Lenoir-Rhyne placed early education students in schools in Hickory and other North Carolina districts in the past, they quickly learned not everyone teaches reading the same way. “That’s very confusing when they’re learning something in college, but they’re not seeing it practiced in the schools,” Campbell said.

But next year, state law is forcing Hickory and every other district in the state to jettison other ways of teaching reading in favor of science-based methods.

Second grade students use flash cards to learn words in Spanish during a dual-immersion class at Southwest Primary School in Hickory, N.C. Credit: Ariel Gilreath for The Hechinger Report

It will not be an easy process.

The law requires all early education teachers, future educators and professors in teacher preparation programs to be retrained in reading instruction grounded in the science of reading.

The training will take between 138 and 168 hours over the span of two years, which will equal a few hours a week. In order to complete the herculean task of retraining thousands of teachers across the state, the initiative is being rolled out in three phases — phase one started this fall. Hickory Public Schools is in phase three, which is set to start next summer.

Related: How coaches for teachers could improve reading instruction, close early academic gaps

The mandate comes at a particularly difficult time for schools. With a shortage of teachers, substitutes and bus drivers, districts in the first phase are already reporting challenges with the time-intensive training. Teachers can either complete it during the workday, which is hard when there are not enough substitutes to cover classes, or they can do it at home.

After the pressures teachers experienced from the pandemic, administrators are worried teachers will quit, said Timothy Sims, director of federal programs in Hickory Public Schools.

“The training is going to be a good thing for our teachers. Getting through it is going to be really tough,” Sims said.

But advocates for the changes believe it will be worth it in the long run for the 35,000 North Carolina third graders who ended last school year reading below grade level, and the thousands of younger children coming up behind them.

Campbell knows it will be a lot of work for schools and universities, but she’s hopeful about the end result.

“It’s going to be a wonderful thing when everyone is on the same page,” Campbell said.

This story about the science of reading was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, as part of the project “Reading Remedies,” a collaboration with The Christian Science Monitor and the Education Labs at AL.com, The Dallas Morning News, The Fresno Bee, The Post and Courier and The Seattle Times. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Letters to the Editor

8 Letters

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  1. Reading training is just law makers friend who made a program that they have now forced the state to pursnd use. Smaller class sizes and interventionist to pull kids in small groups is what works.

  2. I have had LETRS training and it was wonderful and very informative. I am amazed at the amount of teachers who have no idea how the brain works when learning to read! Many were resistant to SOR training because they don’t want to change what they’ve been doing, or they feel their reading “training” suffices. While Skechers like Lucy Calkins’ TC are beautifully thought out, they are seldom effective with many literacy disadvantaged students.

  3. have had LETRS training and it was wonderful and very informative. I am amazed at the amount of teachers who have no idea how the brain works when learning to read! Many were resistant to SOR training because they don’t want to change what they’ve been doing, or they feel their reading “training” suffices. While programs like Lucy Calkins’ TC are beautifully thought out, they are seldom effective with many literacy disadvantaged students.

  4. Phonics, correctly taught, improves reading.

    I applaud North Carolina officials for taking the important step of going scientific in their statewide emphasis on improving reading instruction.

    I’m a retired teacher who began my self-initiated pre-service teacher education with Orton-Gillingham intensive systematic phonics training (which was not being offered in my licensure program), which I then implemented in an after school remedial reading program—soon seeing the magic of light-heartedly drawing young minds into the technical practice of decoding text (we followed 10-15 minutes of phonics with round robin reading and story crafting). After 60 hours of sessions over 10 weeks, test scores rose 1 to 2 grade levels. Resistance by many teachers to implementing systematic phonics and phonemic awareness instruction as a key part of early elementary literacy education is well known. So hats off to those willing to do it.
    But if they’re going to do it, they should be getting it right. Getting it wrong can be just as confusing to budding readers as 3 cueing.

    What’s wrong with this excerpt from the story?

    “She erased the “m” and jotted down a “p.”
    “Cat,” a boy in a Lego shirt said.
    “Did you just say ‘cuh?’ ” Creger asked him. “I heard you say ‘cuh.’ What sound is this?” She pointed to the “p” again.
    “Puh,” he enunciated. “Pat.”
    The problem here is a common one among novice phonics teachers— including a short vowel sound as a vocalized part of what should be an exclusive consonant sound.

    If a student learns to “hear” the consonants such as b, c, d, f, etc. as including a short vowel /u/ or /a/ sound, effective decoding—not to mention spelling—becomes unnecessarily confusing and frustrating.
    (How do you decode, or spell, /cat/ if you just “know” it’s beginning sound is /cuh/?)
    The astute teacher who tunes the ear to students’ pronunciations and (always lightheartedly) says to students, boys and girls I think I just heard TWO sounds when you pronounced the c, p, d, etc.

    Here’s what I mean, she goes on: look at this word: /up/. This word has 2 sounds—short vowel sound /u / (which she pronounces), and the /p/ sound, which is ONLY air (put our lips together like this and block some air then let it out, like this—but no voice sound with it.

    So, with a bit of practice, if she’s hearing (and hopefully not modeling 2-sound consonants that have a vowel tag and should only be one sound), then she’ll playfully say, Ohhhh, I think I just heard 2 sounds when you pronounced the b, c, d, etc. Then, again, she models the consonant correctly, also demonstrating it incorrectly.

    Young kids are sponges for language; they can pick up nuances like these with little prompting and modeling. Practicing the /u/ short vowel sound alone will also help. When they hear and produce the sounds correctly and learn to map them to written letters, then also see them in short words such as but, pup, pop, pat, etc., their reading will improve.
    But learning incorrect pronunciations of letters that should have one distinct sound will slow their progress.

    There’s a Youtube video that illustrates the same mistakes:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l69yZ5xabbo The presenter is modeling k, k, kee and her script shows ka, ka, kee and other similar mistakes.

    Hopefully, North Carolina’s trainers will get this right. When they do, test scores will improve and the state will become a positive role model for others.

    Jim Baker, Ph.D.

  5. Phonics is essential for learning to read, especially for students whose first language is not English. On the other hand, I would like to know what the writer of this article expects of kindergarteners in terms of reading. Are we now pushing first grade expectations into kindergarten?

    When I taught kindergarten in the late 1960s, phonics was taught but included with that was a linguistic approach – with a lot of emphasis on word families. The kindergarteners were not expected to be able to decode and read books. As with all things, some children learned to read at that level and most did not, but they were ready to pursue more formal reading instruction in first grade.

    Reading comprehension depends on content knowledge. Let’s not forget that. The skills are tools for reading but to understand what you are reading you need varied experiences and knowledge.

  6. Hello everyone,

    I’m a midlife career change you only became a teacher in my early forties but it was always my dream since I was a small child. Life kind of gives you some detours. I now teach kindergarten and it’s always been my dream and passion, particularly teaching students to read. Before I even knew what the reading wars were, or the different philosophies like balanced literacy or whole word, I never looked at teaching reading or even learning to read words that way, although having started Kinder 1979 it’s very likely that’s the way I was taught. Fortunately for me I had always loved books and it wasn’t as difficult a task to learn to read as it is for many others. I am actually shocked by those teachers that are unwilling and not open to learning what me always seem like common sense. Our language is one that is phonetic, not symbolic/picture oriented.

    I hope these reading words soon are put to bed. I’m hesitant to read an article I recently saw called, The New Reading Wars. I don’t have a solution but when money and politics aren’t the driving forces then maybe our students will have a better chance. But until then, thank goodness for all the passionate, open-minded teachers out there!

  7. Check further into what’s happening in Mississippi. This has nothing to do with reading levels or reading science; it’s a political maneuver. The third grade “literacy gate” test does not measure literacy. It’s a 50-question computerized test. If it measured third grade reading level (which a 50-question multiple choice test could never do), the students would get immediate feedback about their reading level. When your child completes the test, they do not get a score that says they are reading at __ grade level. What actually happens is this: the MDE rank- orders the raw scores and determines a cut score at the 85th%ile from the current year’s scores. And they have to take the cut score to the State Board every year for approval. If it actually measured literacy, that would not be necessary. Here is the reality. The top 85% passes; the bottom 15% fails, unless you have an IEP or have been in the Tier process for 2 years. Then you get an exemption. (Nowhere in Mississippi is the tier process or special education run by data and evidence-based practices.) With the scoring the way it is, all students taking the test could be reading above 3rd grade level, or all students taking the test could be reading below 3rd grade level. The test in NO WAY reveals that information. It is very suspicious that exactly 85% of the students, year after year, are determined to be “reading at third grade level.” The Board basically approves every year for 15% of third graders to be retained, regardless of grades, skill development in the classroom, teacher recommendations. Research indicates that retention has no long-term benefits, but harmful consequences. Mississippi cannot afford to educate kids for 13 years (k-12), but they are willing to add one more year to the costs, for what…no long-term benefits and poor outcomes for kids? So it’s smoke and mirrors, all orchestrated by people who practice education without a license.

  8. I agree with Jim Baker’s comments and was struck immediately upon reading the quote at the beginning, “mmm, ah, tuh”.

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