Kata Solow

'We can praise DI, AND we can also say “there are other good programs and approaches out there.” I really hope Emily Hanford says this explicitly and directly (see what I did there?). This is one way she can avoid simplifying the important story that she’s sharing.' @KataSolow of @SoRclassroom on Sold a Story, Season Two.

.@mpershan makes a compelling case that cueing/whole language theory wasn't the true culprit in America's reading struggles. His detailing of the mishmash of teacher approaches to teaching reading over the years is both sobering and important reading. I agree with Pershan's take on Emily Hanford: she isn't to blame for the “phonics overteaching” pendulum swing. She did valuable work in teeing up problems about phonics being under-executed, at minimum, in many American classrooms. That said, the entire field is grappling with a central reality: Hanford's work illuminated a problem. But it didn't do much to inform readers on how to solve the problem. It created massive interest in the problem, and into that void rushed a number of people, many of whom were advocates, and many of whom popularized ideas that are more theoretical than grounded in a large body of evidence. Some of these folks became newly-minted influencers.. And there's a lesson from the Lucy Calkins era on what happens when influencers go to popularize approaches they believe in that don't have a deep evidence base. Today, we're witnessing all kinds of "Implementation Wars" (as I call them) because the solutions aren't clear-cut. It's a blessing that we aren't battling against whole language theory, but that doesn't mean that schools have a clear path to success. For a good paired text: @s_e_schwartz at EdWeek just published important reporting on the growing popularity of linguistic phonics. The bigger picture message of the piece is that we don't have a lot of research on the different approaches to teaching phonics, because there isn't only one way. That's what the field needs to grapple with now: the competing marketplace of solutions being peddled to teachers. The patchwork of practices in schools today is probably not very different from the patchwork illuminated by Michael in this piece. And we should all sit with that.

This is a massively important report from SRI. It captures a clear national trend: American children have been making progress on early literacy assessments (which focus more on word recognition/fluency), but not on state reading assessments in 3rd grade. There's a second grade cliff because we aren't nurturing comprehension as well as word recognition. "Recent research relying on early literacy assessments indicates that 56% of K–2 students nationally are “on track” for learning to read (Amplify, 2025), but only 31% of fourth graders performed at or above the proficient level on the 2024 NAEP reading assessment, a test that requires students to comprehend with greater depth (National Center for Education Statistics, 2025). In other words, Bridging the Divide: Connecting Word Recognition and Language Comprehension in Early Literacy 6 even students who are meeting proficiency benchmarks based on early literacy assessments are not well prepared to comprehend what they are expected to be able to read by third grade (see text box for more information about the literacy assessments). Prior research suggests that these gaps may reflect a lack of alignment between early literacy assessments and state literacy assessments (Koon et al., 2020)."

The Science of Reading movement has mutated into something causing more harm in public education than good.