One week until ResearchEd in NYC! Friends in the northeast, please consider joining me (and Zaretta Hammond, Natalie Wexler, Kristen McQuillan, Zach Groshell, Jim Heal, Meg Lee, Gene Tavernatti, Steve Chiger, +++) at this special event.

Book-Free Reading Curricula

In December, a DC parent published an editorial critiquing the selection of a book-light curriculum.

Last month, the DC State Board of Education invited Natalie Wexler and I to join a panel on the need for books in curriculum. They just published the high points.

I just published my testimony, as well as broader reflections:

I find states to be stuck in ‘standards-speak,’ when the whole field has moved on to grappling with issues beyond-the-Standards, such as the disappearance of books from ELA curricula. State leaders need to hear that clearly.

Also, we seriously need to sit with two key facts:

Every single state curriculum list endorses the use of book-free curricula in ELA. At least one basal (Into Reading or Wonders) is on every state list—even in states with strong curriculum reform efforts, like MA, WI, and LA.

Some states are basal strongholds. Witness the grim landscape in Georgia, thanks to its basal-forward list:

Curriculum Chatter

Shawn Datchuk called for more research on curriculum efficacy, while noting the absence of research from state curriculum efforts. (Y’all know this is why I want a National Curriculum Database, right?)

Lauren Brown issued a plea to prioritize content learning. Her opening was fire:

“Call me crazy, but if you give students a passage to read about volcanoes, why on earth would your objective be to find the main idea of the passage instead of, well, to learn about volcanoes?”

Like an echo, Olivia Mullins called for more attention to informational text in the early grades. Amen.

Melinda Karshner took on Into Reading: Its recipe is hard to follow, and HMH is asking teachers to “just fold in the cheese.” 😂

Daisy Christodoulou sent a canary from the British coal mine in Do knowledge-rich curriculums cause mental health problems? TL;DR: England pursues curriculum reforms. Curriculum gets more rigorous. Opponents of changes try to suggest teen mental health crisis is due to curriculum changes. Daisy easily debunks this narrative with data from peer countries.

I updated my tracker on the State of State Curriculum Maps:

By any measure, this is a troubling lack of transparency. I’d love to see accountability hawks take on this crusade with me. Accountability starts with transparency, amirite?

The Literacy Zeitgeist

Have you heard of the decoding threshold? It’s important stuff, and Rebecca Kockler did a thoughtful interview with EdWeek’s Sarah Schwartz, getting into the weeds. She makes an important point: multisyllabic word decoding connects to morphology and vocabulary, illustrating the need for the Word Mapping Project.

Oral language gets its due in Kindergartners Aren’t Talking Enough in Class. Why That Matters.

A new study provides more evidence that reading volume matters to reading achievement—in this case, via an intriguing model for increasing reading volume by sending books home with underprivileged students.

At Elana Gordon’s school, 97% of students qualify for free/reduced lunch, and more than 80% of 1st graders are hitting or exceeding benchmark, for the second year in a row. They are clearly getting a lot right. This week, she unpacks various layers.

“Substack has basically become my faculty lounge,” writes Katie Baker in a piece on Brett Benson’s Active Observation protocol. True story.

A popular children’s history book series was allowed to go out of print, writes Natalya Murakhver. Bummer.

The British Lens on the “Over-teaching” Conversation

Some day, I’ll publish a piece explaining that the average American school takes a more complex and time-intensive approach to phonics than the average British school, which adds credence to concerns about “over-teaching.” In the meantime, two sharp British teachers are hitting these notes:

Chris Such did an incredibly thoughtful podcast with Zach Groshell.

Mark Goodrich weighed in, noting that some American practices are “bonkers.”

Math Wars

The SFUSD Algebra mistake spread to NY: “Across New York state, more than 1 in 4 schools don’t offer Algebra 1 to eighth graders, found a report.” Ugh.

Don’t Dismiss the Science of Math Movement, says a retired professor.

Greg Ashman takes on Jo Boaler and the State of Education Research.

Instructional Time Matters

A new tool shows enormous variation in school instructional time for Oregon students.

Ohio launched a Chronic Absenteeism Dashboard, because more than 25% of Ohio students were “chronically absent last year, missing nearly one month of school.” Eek.

Much Ado About Accountability

Freddie deBoer’s takedown of the “accountability thesis” made excellent points. I have a few quibbles; Freddie claims the SFUSD math experiment didn’t replicate much, and the study above proves him wrong. Also, a dozen states have lowered cut scores or graduation requirements since 2020, putting pressure on DeBoer’s argument that little changed since ESSA. Still, it’s a superb read.

None the less, this week brought another “states just need to eat their broccoli and Do Accountability” OpEd, this time from Jeb Bush. Y’all.

Bush trumpets Florida’s academic gains during his tenure, but fails to mention that Florida became the fastest-declining state in the nation in recent years1. Does accountability have a shelf life?

Or is Florida’s weak recent implementation a culprit? I notice no one’s is holding Florida accountable for its unfortunate ELA curriculum adoption, which begat a weak curriculum landscape:

Nor do accountability superfans ever mention Florida’s failure to publish a curriculum map.

If I call curriculum accountability “the spinach of education reform,” can I get accountability hawks to take it seriously?

EduChatter

We now spend One. Trillion. Dollars. on US Education. Chad Aldeman cues the Austin Powers memes.

The New York Times published the second article in a year featuring efforts by districts to market their way to enrollment. “At more than a dozen New York City schools, the entire first grade is just 15 or fewer students.” I wrote about the role of academics in NYC’s enrollment declines last year, and continue to worry for the nation’s largest district.

Ed Tech Backlash Watch

LAUSD moved to ban screens in K-1 and restrict usage in upper grades. Coverage was everywhere. I spoke with the parents behind the pressure campaign to limit Ed Tech in LA; their group has exploded.

One of those parents shared this state report card on school phone policies.

Instagram reels on parent opt-out are going viral.

In the New York Times, You Can’t Game Your Way to a Real Education ran the table on concerns about tech in schools, although it broadcast one misconception: Ed Tech did not take over when the Common Core “unraveled.” It was a distraction from the new Standards all along2.

Andrew Cantarutti wants schools to be sanctuaries of focus in an age of distraction. I love his title: Why Attention Must Become Curriculium.

A mom in Substack stopped me in her tracks with her take on the iReady debate. Are the iReady articles the new “Sold a Story?” Hmmm.

Dunk of the Week

Vince Boley FTW. 😂

Coming Attractions

Did I mention ResearchEd NYC is next weekend, and NYC is gorgeous in the Springtime?

May 5-6: the Reading League Summit takes on data.

June 30th: the Teaching That Succeeds symposium, which is accepting speaker proposals.

September 26: ResearchEd St. Louis. Apply to speak by 5/15.

October 24: ResearchEd Toronto.

Beyond the Edusphere

“Addiction to short-form videos is associated with reduction of brain activity in the frontal lobe and weakened focus” according to EEG study.

1

New rule: in 2026 and beyond, you can only write about Florida’s reforms if you note this detail:

You probably know that, so I’ll lead with the literacy and learning stories you might’ve missed.

If you’re in the northeast, please consider coming to NYC for the ResearchEd conference in two weeks. It’s a really special event with a stellar speaker list (more below). I’ll be presenting on the dearth of research in the curriculum realm.

Viral For Good Reason

Folks are fired up about Kelsey Piper’s Education research is weak and sloppy. Why?

Hot takes in the footnotes1…

Research Roundup

To combat the research void, let’s lead with some research reflections:

A study found that Tennessee’s hand’s-on Reading360 training improved student outcomes. Go Vols! I called for this training to become the national model.

While we’re on the subject of state training, don’t miss the study on the weak efficacy of LETRS training, which states continue to embrace like lemmings.

Jared Cooney Horvath detailed the iReady research void.

Horvath also collected a number of studies to prove that Digital Tests Don’t Require Digital Classrooms.

Freddy Hiebert, Kristen Conradi Smith, and colleagues published an important study on reading intervention. It’s highly relevant to the conversation about iReady, IMHO.

Curriculum Matters <she screams into the void>

A pair of popular articles come with a caution: we need to focus a lot more on curriculum quality.

First, an article on SFUSD’s literacy turnaround reported that a third of teachers aren’t using the district’s new curriculum. The reporter interviewed Mississippi accountability hawk Rachel Canter, who expressed outrage about the lack of accountability for curriculum use.

But friends, SFUSD adopted Into Reading, the bloated curriculum with no books in chapter book grades. It also falls short on knowledge-building2. I’d be shoving it aside, too, if I taught in San Francisco. Also, SFUSD selected Creative Curriculum for PreK, an unstructured curriculum notoriously weak on early reading and math. None of this is good. None of this is mentioned in the article.

While we’re talking about curriculum quality, have I mentioned that Into Reading is one of the top 3 curricula used in Mississippi, and iReady is #1?? I did mention it, actually3. Someone should hold Mississippi accountable for letting its curriculum shortcomings fester.

On the positive side: Meriden, CT was featured for punching above its weight in literacy. Yeah! The article speaks of a smooth curriculum adoption… but won’t tell us which curriculum. Sigh. By scouring the CT state database and school board docs, it seems Meriden uses Fundations with Geodes, Heggerty, and Core Knowledge for comprehension. (I think.)

Journalist friends, if I want to know this detail, so do other readers. Can we puh-lease include these nuances?

Learning on Learning

Michele Caracappa unpacks some gut-punch research on intervention, finding “students grew more when they received no additional support whatsoever compared to students placed in the most intense Tier II or III intervention.” Coherence matters, y’all.

Kristen McQuillan’s ode to Dolly Parton and the power of practice asks an essential question, “What should students be practicing, over and over again?

Literacy Zeitgeist

The best response to the “over-teaching phonics” discourse came from Kata Solow, with notes on “right-sizing phonics instruction” and ten other thoughts you should read.

The one that made me verklempt: It’s Not Too Late: Teaching a High School Student to Read From the Ground Up by Faith Howard.

Miah Daughtery captures the civilizational risk lurking in passage popcorn curriculum: In Defense of the Humble Novel.

Doug Lemov resurfaced an excellent teacher video showcasing the FASE reading approach.

The viral video of the week was Jared Cooney Horvath, outing the College Board for watering down SAT expectations in ELA.

Ed Tech Backlash Watch

The backlash groweth.

Here’s what led the “News” segment of Twitter this week:

Both articles were must-reads.

You simply must see this viral article from The Times in headline format. Whew.

The BBC gave us Back to books - Sweden’s schools cutting back on digital learning.

Two hundred parents in affluent Lower Merion, PA signed a petition to opt out of devices. The district says they can’t. I predict this “standoff” will recur nationally.

Meghna Chakrabarti’s On Point radio show gave us a roundup: The teachers pushing back on screens in schools.

EduChatter

The federal DOE released a list of priorities—essentially, signals about what they want to fund. Literacy made the list.

Eight states are projected to have double-digit enrollment declines in the next five years, according to a Bellwether report.

Emily Oster challenges the paper claiming smartphones caused the global learning decline. Her take: it’s the pandemic.

What Happens in San Diego

The annual ASU+GSV conference—where Ed Tech goes to get funded—was a more subdued affair this year.

It was still a whirlwind, best-characterized as a rave by Andy Rotherham, who reminded us that actual learning gets short-shrift in these spaces: “The education field, ironically given what we’re supposed to be doing, absolutely loves substitutes for content and content-rich learning. It’s like a drug around here.” Amen. Read the whole thing.

Frankly, I was pleased that a Southern Surge panel made the ASU+GSV agenda, and thrilled to moderate the conversation. John White made some excellent points about our national capacity to scale the work.

Meme of the Week

Thank you to Vince Boley for reviving this gem:

Coming Attractions

April 30: Tim Odegard and Megan Gierka present Rome Wasn’t Built on a Scope & Sequence.

May 2nd: Join me at ResearchEd NYC! It’s a really special, affordable event with an outstanding speaker list: Zaretta Hammond, Natalie Wexler, Kristen McQuillan, Jim Heal, Zach Groshell, Steve Chiger, Gene Tavernatti, +++.

June 30th: the Teaching That Succeeds symposium The organizers welcome speaker proposals.

September 26: ResearchEd St. Louis. Apply to speak by 5/15.

Beyond the EduSphere

“Two weeks without mobile internet improved mental health more than antidepressants and reversed roughly 10 years of attentional decline.” Get offline and get happier, y’all!

3

Re-sharing this footnote from my November article on the curriculum-led reform in Louisiana and Tennessee:

Across the country, you’ll find at least one and sometimes three lesser programs on the most-used list in every state outside LA/TN. Even Mississippi and Alabama are still working on curriculum reform. Here are the top programs in those states, noting that it’s a smallish sample in Mississippi (representing approximately 26% of Mississippi schools):

As I have written previously, these states have phased in curriculum reforms. Some believe that Mississippi’s 8th grade gains have lagged its 4th grade gains because it needs to address this gap.

For anyone catching up, this reading list covers all of the angles.

While I’m biased, I think my original piece on the Southern Surge, which broke the story, offers the most detail, for those up for the 3,000-word version. It’s rich with links to others’ writing.

But if you want to start at a high level, I give you…

The Southern Surge Executive Summary

What did Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Alabama do to outpace the nation in reading growth? These four states share a common set of reforms, albeit with different orders of operation, timelines, and emphases.

We must get straight on the plays in the Southern Surge playbook. Because it’s not just phonics. There are four parts to the playbook:

1. Mandatory screening of students in grades K-3, three times a year, using approved assessment tools, to monitor how early reading skills are developing

2. Focused efforts to improve curriculum quality in schools — for phonics and other aspects of literacy

3. Large-scale efforts to train teachers

4. Retention policies to hold back students who aren’t reading successfully by the end of third grade

Many focus on the retention policies. They are important and do seem to motivate adults to pull out all the stops. But kids cannot learn to read on retention mandates alone. Retention policies work because so much is done between Kindergarten and third grade to ensure all kids develop reading skills.

Before a student is retained, he or she will be screened 12 times across four grades, using a quality screening tool approved by the state. Well-trained teachers will have quality lesson materials, and they will know which students need extra support. It’s a system set up to work so that very few students need to be retained in third grade — which is exactly what happens.

One can debate the best order of operations. But one cannot reduce those multilayered reforms, which have been underway for 20+ years in Mississippi, 13 years in Louisiana, six years in Tennessee, and six years in Alabama, to “they just went back to basics with phonics1.”

Peeling Back The Onion

After writing my detailed overview of the reforms, I dove deeper into these details:

• How Book-Rich, Knowledge-Rich Curriculum is Fueling the Southern Surge

• Where Tennessee Tops All, and deserves to be the national model

• How the Southern Surge story is being oversimplified, and how states are missing the boat on replication

Kunjan Narechania, former Chief of Staff at the Louisiana DOE, worked with former Commissioner John White to capture ways that structure and culture in southern states foster these reforms.

Hear From Journalists

Kelsey Piper penned an absolute must-read, “Illiteracy is a policy choice,” getting into the performance weeds versus other states.

Nick Kristof of the New York Times visited Southern Surge states, and returned to proclaim: These Three Red States Are the Best Hope in Schooling.

The “Northern Nosedive” proclaimed by the Boston Globe compared the northeast and Southern Surge states, to memorable effect.

Aspiring presidential candidate Rahm Emauel declared that “Democrats need an education reset,” and these states’ reforms “should be the meat and potatoes of Democrats’ education agenda.”

In The Atlantic, Idrees Kahloon explored the “low-expectations theory” for American educational declines, citing the Southern Surge as an important counter factual.

David Brooks also cheered the “so-called Southern Surge” in the New York Times.

These States vs Your State

Are you under the impression that your high-performing state has nothing to learn from these states? I highly recommend Chad Aldeman’s insightful comparison of New Jersey vs Mississippi/Louisiana, revealing the role of demographics in state outcomes. It’ll blow your mind.

Competing Theories

Rachel Canter has made the case that Mississippi’s accountability work deserves more credit than it’s being given.

Elliot Haspel thinks the early childhood work gets some credit.

Neetu Arnold and Daniel Buck think school discipline policies are a factor.

Debunking Misinfo

Have you heard bad rumors that Mississippi’s gains are just a data anomaly?

Kelsey Piper and I collaborated on a piece to push back on this misunderstanding.

Later, Kelsey went even deeper into the data in a two-part series that chased every foul ball.

I got Mississippi Misinfo Fatigue, and made a case for using Louisiana as the poster child for state reform, instead.

Replication Risks

I’m closing with my own cautionary notes about the national efforts to chase similar reforms:

The Southern Surge Watershed reflects on headwinds and tailwinds for these reforms.

Policy is Not Progress surveys the track record for literacy reform (and samples Rick Hess).

Thank you to everyone who has written about—and read about—these states. I’m inspired by the excitement about this story.

The Volunteer State implemented similar reforms to Louisiana, but in roughly half the time. Truly, a remarkable cascade of programs have dropped since 2018.

Critically, this work has been embraced by educators. Tennessee achieved unprecedented success for its curriculum reforms: two years into its last ELA adoption, 96% of teachers reported that they primarily used the materials adopted by their districts.

Its pioneering teacher training also earned high marks from teachers. Tennessee’s Reading360 training was homegrown (developed in partnership with TNTP) and designed to be hand’s on. Teachers learned about reading research at the front end of the training. At the end, they worked with their actual curricula, and modeled lessons for each other.

Thanks to this tangible approach, 97% of attendees gave the training high marks for utility. Tennessee offered $1000 stipends for completing the training, a nice show of respect for teacher time. The state trained nearly all of its elementary teachers over the course of two summers—the fastest pace of any state.

Best of all, it raised reading outcomes, according to a study by the Tennessee Reading Research Center:

“The average TN-URS performance among the full sample of K-1 students was significantly higher when they were taught by teachers who completed one or both Early Reading Training courses compared to their peers in the control group taught by teachers who did not participate in training.”

I believe Reading360 training should be the national model. Recently, Tennessee has also begun offering training to PreK teachers. Huzzah!

The Volunteer State has solid gains to show for its efforts. It’s in the top 3 states for NAEP gains in the last two years1. A new report by Adam Tyner puts Tennessee at the head of the class2, compared to peer states.

For all these reasons, I’ve been sorry to see Tennessee missing from some of the national coverage of the Southern Surge.

Today, it’s my pleasure to share fresh insights from Lizzette Reynolds, Tennessee’s Commissioner. We’ll be sharing the stage at ASU+GSV, discussing ways to advance the Southern Surge. Whether you’re in San Diego or not, I want you to hear her thoughts.

Straight from the Commissioner: a Q&A with Lizzette Reynolds

What would you like people to know about your state’s work that isn’t getting a lot of attention in the media coverage?

Commissioner Reynolds: Tennessee’s continued commitment to high-impact literacy strategies has driven record-high student proficiency rates every year since 2023. We believe sustained literacy gains have had a ripple effect on the recent gains Tennessee has experienced in all tested subjects across all grade bands.

Our efforts remain steady, with ongoing measures of impact and constant refinement of supports to improve literacy outcomes. We consistently implement evidence-based practices, including direct instruction grounded in the science of reading and the use of high-quality, knowledge-building materials. The Centers for Regional Excellence (CORE), under the Office of Academics, directly support district implementation of HQIM.

Throughout the year, we offer a combination of in-person and on-demand training for teachers and instructional leaders. Recently, adolescent literacy grants were awarded to nearly half of Tennessee’s districts, and almost 1,000 pre-kindergarten educators received foundational literacy training for the first time last summer3. Collaborative preparation and student work analysis among general, special, and English learner educators are generating promising results in accelerating learning for all student groups. In addition, the department monitors educator preparation program (EPP) literacy training, and a new EPP literacy network is launching to further support educator readiness to teach reading from the first day of instruction.

The Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement (TISA) funding formula also prioritizes early literacy through direct funding for literacy supports in grades K-2 and outcomes funding for students that are proficient by the end of third grade and those that were not proficient in third grade but improved their performance level on the state assessment by fourth grade.

The state letter-grade accountability system, implemented in 2023, clearly communicates progress at the school level and provides transparency to parents and other stakeholders. We want to acknowledge that this work would not have been possible without districts and teachers, whose dedication has been essential at every stage. As other states look to replicate this success, Tennessee’s experience shows that sustained, comprehensive investments in state-led, locally implemented literacy strategies can yield the strongest and most lasting results for students, schools, and communities.

What’s your biggest concern about the “Southern Surge” story and how it is being told and understood?

Commissioner Reynolds: The Southern Surge marks a significant achievement for advocates of explicit, systematic reading instruction for every child. Years of advocacy, research, and policy work have led to this moment, which deserves recognition.

But we can’t stop there.

Strong policy is critical, but it is only the beginning. A state may have the best reading legislation yet still have eighth graders who can decode text without comprehension. This remains the literacy crisis, though it may appear differently.

To maintain this momentum, we must expand our focus beyond early grades and address the full scope of literacy development. Comprehension begins from the first day of instruction, not just in middle school. The Southern Surge requires us to both sustain early literacy efforts and ensure that every child develops the knowledge, context, vocabulary, and curiosity necessary for true understanding.No state has fully established this continuum, which is where the Southern Surge could falter.

In Tennessee, we recognize this need and are committed to advancing our efforts. With a $27 million grant from the US Department of Education, we have launched new initiatives in adolescent literacy this year. This progress does not come at the expense of our early literacy work. Both areas are essential for student success, and our district leaders and teachers are prepared for the challenges ahead.

Our challenge is not limited to middle school; it is a systemic issue that begins much earlier. Sustaining this movement requires us to look beyond third grade and insist on instruction that is content-rich, builds knowledge, and prepares every student for success after graduation.

Congress is contemplating action on the Science of Reading. What would be at the top of your wish list for federal action?

Commissioner Reynolds: Federal support is essential not to direct how states teach reading, but to accelerate the work that states are already leading, particularly in implementation.

Congress can play a constructive role by:

• Supporting teacher preparation reform efforts so new educators graduate fully prepared to teach reading using evidence-based practices.

• Investing in high-quality professional learning, especially for practicing teachers who were not trained in the science of reading.

• Providing flexible, sustained funding streams for tutoring, early literacy intervention, and high-quality instructional materials. Comprehensive Literacy State Development Grants have been significant in Tennessee’s investments in literacy and associated statewide strategies.

• Encouraging strong research partnerships to help states evaluate impact, identify effective models, and share lessons learned.

• Improving data transparency at the national level so states can compare progress and better understand the impact of policy choices without adding burden to districts.

Related Reading

Don’t miss Lisa Coons’s column on Reading360 training, unpacking the details. The TNTP team also shared their insights.

If you’re reading this, you probably care about Southern Surge replication. I recently wrote about the weak track record of policy to spawn change in Policy is Not Progress.

Want details on some specific state stumbling blocks in reading reform? Find them here.

1

Here are the scale score rankings, care of Marc Porter Magee:

2

Here’s Tyner’s ranking of “SEC states” (and yes, I got a chuckle out of a state comparison born of a college football conference).

If any of us miss articles, it’s probably because social media is so screwy nowadays. Nate Silver wrote an eye-opening analysis of the current social media “freak show,” and it fits with my own sense of Twitter’s decline (generally, and especially for education discourse). A viral video explained how political influencers collude in Twitter, which doesn’t help.

As EduTwitter flounders, long live Substack!

Thanks for reading (and sharing) this newsletter as I attempt to stitch together EduTwitter-discovery-but-in-Substack.

Viral For Good Reason

The Cost of Over-Teaching Phonics was everywhere… for good reason. Liana Loewus clearly explains the ways over-teaching can manifest.

Mark Seidenberg echoed its themes in his new Substack.

On Center Stage

The New York Times featured Mississippi on its influential podcast The Daily.

Rachel Canter argued that accountability is the secret sauce of Mississippi’s success in The Atlantic. Accountability fans cheered. Based on my own citizen journalism, I’m not convinced “accountability” is the best explanation for Mississippi’s success, and Sarah Mervosh’s NYT reporting helps cement my case. More on this in the footnotes1.

Have you looked at the national track record for literacy policy? Spoiler: it really isn’t good. I collect numerous points of evidence in Policy is Not Progress.

As if on cue, New York state reminded us that state leaders tend to double down on their terrible policy decisions, rather than course-correct. Sigh.

The Shanker Institute celebrates Maryland’s choice to hire Carey Wright as a signal of bipartisan embrace of reading reforms.

Curriculum Matters

David Steiner makes essential points about the role of strong curriculum in high-performing countries. Huzzah! But, I was bummed to see EdReports boosted to school boards in this piece, given the issues with its work.

Tweet of the Week went to Samantha Lippert. The hot takes wrote themselves! Truly, you shouldn’t miss the Word Mapping Project.

The Literacy Zeitgeist

Assigning at-home reading to parents helps to boost reading comprehension.

Doug Lemov pens a love note to formative writing.

Mark Seidenberg explains What Hollis Scarborough’s Research Tells Us About the Language Origins of Dyslexia.

Laura Stam is back with more on Opportunities to Respond.

Learning on Learning

Dan Willingham’s excellent piece on students’ attention has been revived in AFT’s magazine: Ask the Cognitive Scientist: Do Today’s Kids Have Reduced Attention Spans?

It’s impossible to miss the way the “science of reading” crowd has increasingly been equally (more?) invested in the Science of Learning:

Teachers were teaching other teachers about retrieval practice—you can watch a recording!—and the actionable learnings clearly stuck.

I wish I had time to write about the raging Math Wars, because there’s much to say. Math Needs Its ‘Science of Reading’ Moment offers a good example.

Ed Tech Backlash Watch

What Happened After a Teacher Ditched Screens in The Atlantic, featuring Dylan Kane’s story.

Schools across America are quietly admitting that screens in classrooms made students worse off and are reversing years of tech-first policies in Fortune.

Daisy Christo has a really thoughtful take in Education technology is never neutral.

EduChatter

Everyone is buzzing about outcomes-based contracting models which “put both vendors and school districts on the hook for results.” Greg Toppo reports.

Coming Attractions

This week: Learning and the Brain is live from New York and available virtually April 16-18. Hear Dan Willingham, Natalie Wexler, Sarah Oberle, Leslie Laud, ++.

Join me at ResearchEd NYC on May 2nd!

ResearchEd St. Louis is coming in September. Apply to speak by 5/15.

A new Teaching That Succeeds symposium has been announced for June 30th, and the stellar organizers are seeking speaker proposals.

Beyond the EduSphere

Walking rewires your brain, and sedentary behavior shrinks it. Go for a walk today!

The Back Catalog

Last week, I really enjoyed putting together a ‘greatest hits’ list of articles that live rent-free in my head. Check it out if you missed it.

50 states have enacted Science of Reading reforms since 2019. Yet only a few have NAEP reading gains to show in the same period. In fact, many states show declines in reading proficiency over the last decade.

Why is Science of Reading reform translating into reading gains in a few states, yet in other states, it is very much not?

The issue isn’t specific to “Science of Reading” bills. Implementation Failure is also the story for dyslexia legislation.

A recent study “compared trends before and after dyslexia laws were enacted across 47 states, ” and the findings were grim:

“First, more than half of the states with these new laws showed no significant shift in identifying learning disabilities related to reading. Some states identified more students, some fewer, but there was no consistent national pattern.

Second, reading achievement among students identified with learning disabilities often declined, rather than improved, after these laws passed in many states, including Alaska, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio and West Virginia.”

To the surprise of no one, the report highlights1 Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama as bright spots. These Southern Surge states excel on implementation. It’s the only way.

The study offers another reminder that policy alone is not progress. As the authors put it:

“Passing a law doesn’t equal classroom change… Our findings suggest that dyslexia laws often raised awareness about dyslexia and early reading difficulties without fully changing classroom practices.”

The lesson is consistent. Yet it seems we aren’t learning it, based on the current flurry of legislative activity.

So, I’m rounding up a few cautionary tales about the policy track record and the state of state leadership.

The Fifty State Policy Scorecard

A recent analysis from ExcelInEd offers a reality check.

ExcelInEd has been a leading proponent of state reading reforms, particularly Mississippi’s policy playbook. It’s an understandable instinct, given Mississippi remarkable gains in 4th grade reading.

Yet this hasn’t been a consistent recipe for success. Vince Bielski recently reported on the mixed picture:

“In all, ExcelinEd has identified 18 reforms, including dyslexia screening and parental notification of reading problems, that the most successful states have implemented. Given the heavy lift, it’s not surprising that some states have stumbled.

Of the 15 states that adopted most of the 18 policies by 2019, 10 of them outpaced the national average in fourth-grade NAEP reading scores by 2024… but test scores in four of the 15 states declined more than the nation’s did, and Michigan tied, showing the difficulty of implementing the reforms.”

I wondered how this broke down, and I was able to get my hands on the underlying analysis, thanks to Vince and Christy Hovanetz, the Senior Policy Fellow at ExcelinEd:

This picture doesn’t serve as a strong endorsement of the ExcelInEd policy prescription, and here’s why:

The Southern Surge states represent 4/10 states that ExcelInEd claims as policy Wins.

Then there’s Florida. It went through a phase with strong leadership and reform efforts, and gains followed. But in recent years, Florida has been the fastest-declining state in the nation overall2, with a meaningful drop in reading:

Not exactly the dream reference case, and what’s more, the 2002 “baseline” for Florida in ExcelInEd’s analysis raises its own questions about how we should interpret the influence of a 24-year-old law.

My argument is that implementation is the real leverage point, not policy. Good implementation takes leadership. I see a compelling case that Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama, and Florida went through chapters when strong leaders truly leaned into strong implementation, and outcomes rose because of well-executed reforms3.

But if we call those states Implementation Stories, and take those five states out of the ExcelInEd data set, we’re left with ten states that passed a big pile of legislation, and only half of them have gains to show for it.

Every legislation booster needs to sit with that.

Leadership > Legislation

My conviction that policy is not the primary driver was shaped by firsthand experience in Southern Surge states.

Between 2018 and 2022, I visited classrooms across Tennessee during the early years of the state’s literacy reforms. I also interviewed educators in dozens of districts specifically about their literacy work. Policy never came up.

I heard a great deal, however, about the state’s role.

In advance of the 2019–20 curriculum adoption cycle, Tennessee leaders convened regional meetings of district leaders to facilitate information-sharing about curriculum and professional learning options. District leaders consistently described these sessions as invaluable.

District leadership can be isolating, and Tennessee’s deliberate efforts to connect leaders across districts sparked important peer-to-peer learning. Educators were debating whether to adopt Tennessee’s new free phonics program or keep their existing curriculum, and how to get teachers to ‘break up’ with practices rooted in Balanced Literacy. Collaboration helped.

The state designed hands-on, proprietary teacher training delivered over two summers that reached more than 90% of teachers. Everyone praised this training and how it reinforced the curriculum work.

State leaders understood that the best outcomes would come from strengthening local capacity, in classrooms and district offices. They intentionally highlighted pioneering districts, to inspire replication elsewhere. The work was thoughtful, practical, and deeply people-centered.

Policy and funding were enabling conditions, of course. But focused implementation—designed around educator needs and capacities—was the fuel in the reform engine.

When I speak with educators in Louisiana and Mississippi, those themes recur.

State Leader Capacity is the Lynchpin

Literacy policies are executed by state chiefs of education — the officials (sometimes called superintendents or commissioners) who lead state education agencies and shape how law and regulation translate into practice.

Leadership experience varies widely, and the role sees a good deal of turnover. For example, Virginia’s chief has changed twice since early 2025.

Ballotopedia tracks the state chiefs nationally. A review shows:

• Six chiefs are new in the last 6 months

• Five more chiefs are new in the last 12 months

• Five more chiefs are new since the beginning of 2025

In sum, a third of state chiefs are new to the position.

Further, many had no previous experience at the state level, and some had no prior education experience. Implementation is compromised when chiefs are learning on the job.

The role itself has also become more political. In many states, debates over school choice, funding, and culture-war issues dominate K-12 discourse, often pushing classroom practice and literacy implementation into the background.

In addition, some state agencies approach their role primarily as funding distributors, cheerleaders, or compliance monitors, rather than as drivers of implementation quality. As one well-connected policy advisor describes it:

‘When I ask, “OK, you passed these laws, how many districts changed?,” nobody can answer the question.’

Policy can compel action, but it can’t ensure quality execution.

When writing on the Southern Surge, I’ve emphasized the role of savvy leadership. In Mississippi, Carey Wright deployed state literacy coaches into underperforming schools and did so without triggering backlash. In Louisiana, John White and Kunjan Narechania rebuilt state systems to incentivize high-quality curriculum work, Rebecca Kockler designed the first curriculum review process of the Common Core era, and Whitney Whealdon authored a superb homegrown ELA curriculum. In Tennessee, Penny Schwinn and Lisa Coons architected the curriculum and training work described earlier.

These examples are not accidents. They are evidence of what strong state implementation leadership can accomplish.

Critically, there isn’t a strong, routine national framework holding chiefs accountable for implementation quality. At the federal level, the mantra has been “power back to the states,” but zero incentives or accountability mechanisms are tied directly to how well state agencies execute reforms.

This opacity is unfortunate, because when you really get into the weeds of reform efforts, the difference in execution becomes impossible to ignore.

In the next installment, I’ll look at how these differences play out in practice. Stay tuned for Part II.

Related Reading: this short spotlight on Tennessee’s track record offers a nice contrast. People-centered programs > Policy, all day long.

Same Hymn, Different Pews

You don’t have to take it from me. Rick Hess recently published a cautionary piece on Southern Surge replication, and we’re singing from the same hymnal.

Here is Rick’s straight talk:

“Policy is a blunt tool that works best when compelling action is enough. That’s why policy works reasonably well if the task is issuing Social Security checks or setting noise ordinances. It’s much shakier when the action is more nuanced, like changes in instruction, curriculum, or classroom culture. The failure to appreciate this has tripped up a slew of seemingly sensible reforms, from teacher evaluation to school turnarounds.

In education, bets on policy are safest when dealing with “musts” and “must nots,” as with things like compulsory attendance, annual assessments, class size limits, and graduation requirements. These tend to be clear-cut and quantifiable. If you want to require that school choice programs get funded, or that high schools offer career apprenticeships, there’s no substitute for policy.

Policy is far less reliable when it aims for complex endeavors concerned more with how things are done than whether they are. Compulsory attendance doesn’t mean students will learn anything. Funding a choice program doesn’t mean it will be accessible or competently managed. High schools can “offer” apprenticeship programs without providing meaningful placements or supervision.

Again: Policy can’t make people do things wisely or well. And, in education, it’s usually the quality of the thing that matters most—as with teacher evaluation, school improvement, or reading instruction. Equipped with only the blunt instrument of policy, though, public officials face enormous pressure to make the world a better place.”

I take one exception with Rick’s piece: he suggests that Mississippi and Louisiana have both implemented effective curriculum reforms, when in fact, Mississippi has failed to bring knowledge-building curriculum into statewide use (while Louisiana succeeded). I’m always surprised how few EdReformers realize this, when it’s a) important, and b) contributes to Mississippi’s struggles to realize 8th grade gains.

None the less, it’s an excellent read overall.

Coming Attractions

Next week, I’m excited to moderate the Southern Surge panel at ASU+GSV. What do you want to hear from these leaders? Let me know in the comments.

I wrote this list entirely from memory, in about ten minutes.

You see, I’ve shared each of these pieces multiple times, with friends, journalists, and the social airwaves, because each serves as an excellent “explainer” for an important topic in K-12 education—or it introduced ideas that stayed with me.

So, each lives rent-free in my head.

Enjoy these essential reads, plus an Easter egg, of sorts.

Read it, bookmark it, share it:

Do. Not. Wait. by Chad Aldeman

A superb, data-rich case for early intervention in reading.

Why Most Education Apps Fail by Carl Hendrick

A sharp take on ways that Ed Tech has been designed to fail.

Playground Confidential by Cafeteria Duty, a New York City educator

A memorable piece on vibes-based school selection by NYC parents. Frankly, it haunts me.

How classroom technology is holding students back by Natalie Wexler

Before we had a massive Ed Tech backlash, and a zillion articles explaining that tech had failed to deliver learning gains, we had Natalie Wexler telling it straight in 2019. I have tweeted this article at least 250 times, because for the longest time, it was all we had to crystallize the issue. I give it away like candy on Halloween.

My kingdom for a reliable curriculum review by Holly Korbey

Curriculum reviews are a critical failure point in the K-12 ecosystem (a drum I bang constantly), so this one can’t be shared enough.

Why Are So Few Kids Reading for Pleasure? by Greg Toppo

A tour de force on a critical issue.

Thank Goodness for Mississippi and Louisiana by Chad Aldeman

This article does an incredible job of explaining the role of demographics in state NAEP outcomes. Chad shows how Mississippi and Louisiana can credibly claim to provide a better education than New Jersey, based on disaggregated NAEP data. New Jersey has a relatively high share of privileged students, which props up the state in rankings, but the Dirty Jerz looks a lot less shiny at the cohort level. I share Chad’s article all the time to explain this phenomenon about state rankings on the NAEP.

The Media Theory That Explains “99% of Everything” – Derek Thompson interviews Joe Weisenthal

Amidst fears of a “post-literate society,” this podcast highlights the role of the written word in modern societal progress.

The Usefulness of Brief Instruction in Reading Comprehension Strategies by Dan Willingham

An outstanding explainer on reading comprehension strategies: their value and their limitations. How are we still debating the role of strategies when Willingham wrote this in 2006, I wonder?

The Connections Between Writing, Knowledge Acquisition, and Reading Comprehension by Judy Hochman and Natalie Wexler

Writing gets too little attention, and this piece offers an excellent corrective. When the Curriculum Insight Project tackled writing curriculum, it had pride of place for good reason.

Phonics Reform and Literacy Levels by Tim Shanahan

In 2023, Tim Shanahan wrote a piece that explained the limits of phonics instruction alone to raise reading outcomes. It’s written as a reflection on Emily Hanford’s journalism, but the most enduring points are about instructional impact.

How I missed the phonics story by Maureen Downey

In this cautionary tale, a longtime education journalist explains how she bought into Balanced Literacy, until Emily Hanford’s work came along.

Who killed school reform—and how to rebuild it? – Alexander Russo interviews Steven Wilson

I didn’t realize how badly “high-performing” charters had faltered in recent years by defocusing on academics until I came across this interview.

The Easter Egg: a bittersweet observation on recent trends

I’ve been thinking all week about stats coming out of the Curriculum Insight Project.

We’re Ready to Break Up With iReady has become our most-read piece (by a large margin!), less than two weeks after it published. Go team!

But…

I have feelings about this. On one hand, I’m thrilled. It’s a truly important piece, especially in light of iReady’s market share.

Still, we’ve written about some pretty important topics in the actual curriculum realm.

I struggle watching a piece on Ed Tech outpace the interest in those critical topics—for example, books disappearing from elementary reading curriculum. I’d like to think book-free ELA programs inspire more alarm than any one flawed Ed Tech product.

Core curriculum is deeply important, but it can be the red-headed stepchild of education discourse. How can we change that?

As long as I’m resurrecting important work, I’d humbly ask you to revisit the conversation about book-free reading curricululum. Or the role of excellent curriculum in the reading gains in two states, Louisiana and Tennessee. Or whatever curriculum concern is on your mind.

Coming Attractions

April 9: Sean Morrisey presents on cracking the code in academic vocabulary with the Reading League Illinois.

April 16-18: Learning and the Brain is live from New York and available virtually. Hear Dan Willingham, Natalie Wexler, Sarah Oberle, Leslie Laud, ++.

Join me at ResearchEd NYC on May 2nd!

ResearchEd St. Louis is coming in September. Apply to speak by 5/15.

Thanks for reading! Nominate a story for this newsletter here.

This week, it’s a seven-course belt-buster.

I’m also introducing a new feature: my hot takes in the footnotes! You’re welcome.

On Center Stage

It’s Legislation Season, and Kareem Weaver and Brett Tingley were among the advocates in Washington this week, to advance a Senate bill that would tighten the criteria for state literacy grants. Love the bipartisan vibes!

BUT, I’m bummed that none of the legislation advances the most impactful ideas: a new National Reading Panel and a national curriculum usage database. Can we change this before the bills ship?

Two good columns dropped on the Southern Surge. While I welcome the enthusiasm, I still sweat the subtexts:

First, in How Democrats Lost the Plot on Schools—and How to Get It Back, Charles Barone noted the political rebalancing around reading reform. He’s right, and it’s a laudable trend!

However, Barone praised some states with real implementation shortcomings—a reminder that we need to peel back the onion on state-by-state implementation. (More on that in the footnotes1.)

Second: to understand why I worry about surface-level Southern Surge discourse, read this column in Real Clear Education. It trumpets a “legislative solution” to our “reading crisis” that’s as simple as one state’s Literacy-Based Promotion Act.

Policy (alone) isn’t progress, y’all. It’s time to shout it from the hilltops.

Knowledge, So Hot Right Now

This week’s must-read was a slam dunk case for knowledge-building curriculum from Dan Willingham and E.D. Hirsch.

Natalie Wexler served up an excellent “non-example”, explaining how and why Benchmark Advance is not, in fact, a knowledge-building program. Don’t miss the mind-blowing footnotes.

Laura Patranella detailed similar shortcomings for Into Reading. Same Issues, Different Basal.

Olivia Mullins is working on a framework for explicit elementary science instruction.

Bring Back Books

Doug Lemov and Kyair Butts headlined a recent webinar on how to teach whole books. <swoon>

I think we need to capture the differential volume of reading in book-rich programs versus basals. Here’s a glimpse into that dichotomy (and a preview of things to come):

The Literacy Zeitgeist

Oral language development is all about practice, and this video of Anajette McNeely’s Kindergarten oracy routine is worth your time.

Carl Hendrick on the “orthographic skeleton” will expand your thinking on the connection between vocabulary and reading ability.

“Meeting a standard is only approximating learning,” says Whitney Whealdon in The Problem With Standards.

Laura Stam also shared classroom video, showcasing routines that create response opportunities for all students.

Samantha Lippert is on Week 5 of a fluency intervention. Follow along in her data.

Learning on Learning

Ben Zulauf explains how differentiation-done-wrong backfires for weaker students. Don’t miss the fascinating study on teacher expectations.

SOL in the Wild makes the case. that offering students choice is a misguided vestige of learning styles.

Sarah Oberle and Mitch Weathers have a new book on executive functions in elementary. I really enjoyed their podcast insights.

Ed Tech Backlash Watch

The teachers at the Curriculum Insight Project are Ready to Break Up With iReady, for good reasons.

Chalkbeat delivered a timely story: “This school district gave teachers one week to get rid of screens” Its superintendent heard that reading in K-5 had “almost vanished.” Devices were banned “almost overnight.”

Parents in Lower Merion, an affluent Philadelphia suburb, want to opt out of Ed Tech. The district won’t let them.

Matt Yglesias penned a smart piece on the Ed Tech backlash. I agreed with much of it, but I’m not sold on the Accountability Theory (more in footnotes2).

Help a Researcher Out

Boston University is recruiting participants for a study of different tutoring modalities. From Megan Gierka: “The study is open to first and second grade students in the U.S. who speak English. Participation is remote (with optional in-person implementation).”

Coming Attractions

April 9: Sean Morrisey presents on cracking the code in academic vocabulary with the Reading League Illinois.

April 16-18: Learning and the Brain is live from New York and available virtually. Hear Dan Willingham, Natalie Wexler, Sarah Oberle, Leslie Laud, ++.

Join me at ResearchEd NYC on May 2nd!

ResearchEd St. Louis is coming in September. Apply to speak by 5/15.

Beyond the Edusphere:

“Holding hands with a loved one reduces pain via increased brain-to-brain coupling.”

Next weekend, this newsletter is taking a hiatus. I’ll be resurrecting must-read favorites from the last few years (Easter pun intended). Nominate a story.

Thanks for reading! Nominate a story for this newsletter here.

1

This is my favorite section of Charles Barone‘s piece on how the Democrats lost their way on education:

Yet this section illustrates the limitations of using politics/policy as a barometer for anything.

Barone is right: there are reformers on this list. Dem reformers! And there is a lot of forward progress, too.

BUT... the devil in the details matters, and many of these wannabe reformers have implementation issues holding back their progress.

For example:

- Colorado has mediocre curriculum in many districts thanks to a flawed state list.

On the NAEP, Colorado’s 4th grade reading proficiency is down relative to 2019, and dropped again 2022 to 2024.

- Oregon has a Dept of Ed that likes to dole out $$ and is practically allergic to accountability. Oregon district leaders say this about its Science of Reading reforms.

On the NAEP, Oregon’s reading outcomes have tanked since the 2010’s, and it’s down relative to peers and the national average.

There are bright spots in Oregon. Portland instituted district-level reforms that look like... wait for it... Louisiana’s and Tennessee’s! Two years into work with new book-rich, knowledge-building curriculum, the district is seeing small gains on the state assessment. You never see this detail in national media (nor Baltimore’s somewhat-comparable story).

- In NYC, the reading initiative is well-intentioned and broadly well-structured, but the district let one crummy curriculum onto its allowable list and most schools picked it. Parents and teachers both dislike it, and if Samuels did one thing, he should consider replacing it, so all choices are of higher quality.

Policy isn’t progress, folks. “Reformer mindset” does not translate to reading gains.

For clarity, I don’t fault Barone for not including this detail.

Very little in the media-and-edreform ecosystem is surfacing these granular, execution-level details... so the conversation stays at the “pundit level”. Witness allll the people shouting that Mississippi “just did phonics” and magic happened.

We need to find a way to get more clarity on the finer details that distinguish MS/LA/TN/AL’s execution (not just their policies), or the follow-the-Southern-Surge era will disappoint.

And politicians will continue to get participation trophies for their eloquence, when what we really need is execution.

Congress is mulling literacy legislation. It’s a mixed bag, IMHO.

Chad Aldeman nailed the 8th grade reading conundrum. Every state has upper grade reading woes, and the Southern Surge states are holding their own on the NAEP (while also excelling for low-SES students). Put some respect on their names.

Ed Tech Backlash Watch

Sixteen states have introduced bills to limit Ed Tech in schools.

Moms for Liberty and teachers unions are teaming up to push them through, in the ultimate “wasn’t on my 2026 bingo card” development.

Fortune headline: “America’s math and reading scores tanked after schools ditched textbooks for screens—and AI could worsen the brain rot”

The New York Times asks teachers if there’s too much screen time in school. (Answer: yes.) Now, they are issuing a student survey.

Utah dumps tech-enabled programs.

Pennsylvania joins New Jersey in mandating cursive, in a quest to make pencil and paper great again.

The Literacy Zeitgeist

Holly Korbey unpacks England’s phonics revolution with a guest essay from Mark Goodrich. We have much to learn from the Brits, including their hybrid phonics approach.

Doug Lemov joined Substack, and his first post featured a lesson from Laura Stam, which felt like kismet.

Doug’s encore summarized Dan Willingham’s essential points on the cognitive privilege of stories. <swoon>

Olivia Mullins makes a stellar case for science as a springboard for oral language development.

Natalie Wexler reminds us that Most Struggling Students Get “Incoherent” Instruction (and standards for “HQIM” are dead).

Kate Crist & friends introduced the Secondary Literacy Commons with a focus on fluency in middle grades.

The comments section of Claude Goldenberg’s latest felt like a throwback to Literacy Twitter.

Learning on Learning

Seriously, you have to read Becky Allen’s “Engelmann Last”:

“How do I communicate this so learners necessarily acquire it? Engelmann gives a precise answer to that question. If you know exactly what discrimination or procedure students must learn, his machinery can ensure they learn it reliably.

He is a novel theorist of instructional communication, and not so much a theorist of knowledge or curriculum design.

That contribution is immensely valuable. But it is not the whole of instructional design.

It is the end of it.

Sit with this: “Students told they'd have to teach material recalled ~31% more than those preparing for a test. Nobody actually taught. Just expecting to explain something shifts your brain from passively absorbing to actively organizing.”

Paul Kirschner unpacks contextual interference — why stability feels safe but makes learning fragile.

EduChatter

The College Board watered down AP expectations, because standards are dead.

The Lighter Side of Learning

I love a good math joke, and Pi Day delivered.

Not to be outdone, the Ides of March reminded us that cultural literacy starts with literacy.

Coming Attractions

TODAY! Read Washington hosts a conversation with Freddy Hiebert on ways AI can support vocabulary development.

Learning and the Brain is live from New York (and virtually) on April 16-18. Featuring Dan Willingham, Natalie Wexler, Sarah Oberle, Leslie Laud, ++.

Mark your calendars for ResearchEd NYC on May 2nd. I’m speaking, and hope to see you!

ResearchEd St. Louis has been announced for September. Apply to speak by 5/15.

Thanks for reading! Nominate a story for this newsletter here.

For Spring Break, this newsletter will take a hiatus. Instead, on Easter weekend, I’m resurrecting must-read favorites from the last few years. See what I did there?

What’s the most essential literacy reading of this era? Nominate a story for the Throwback Newsletter here.

On Center Stage

Real Clear Investigations reports on the prospects of Southern Surge replication nationally. It’s insightful and sobering, in equal measure (hoo boy, that ExcelInEd stat).

Rick Hess sounds cautionary notes on the replication prospects, making many good points.

Gavin Newsom takes wobbly steps on literacy, as some ask whether he should focus more on education.

National Outcomes: Still Grim

We’re still seeing slow recovery in reading and math outcomes versus pre-pandemic.

A new NWEA report notes that reading is recovering more slowly than math.

Ed Tech Backlash Watch

A parent’s takedown of iReady Math was the viral article of the week, thanks to fierce social media reaction. Truly, this piece was everywhere. My vote for Essential Read of the Week.

Parent concern about Ed Tech made the New York Times.

I reminded everyone that Louisiana and Tennessee have reading outcome gains to show for low-tech curriculum.

Jon Haidt issued his second plea to get Ed Tech out of schools by September—and he was kind enough to boost my column above, on the role of curriculum in such shifts (!!).

Baltimore superintendent Sonja Santelises announced K-2 ed tech limits, and the internet cheered.

The Reading Implementation Wars

In EdWeek, Sarah Schwartz explored the question of the hour: “Are we overteaching phonics?” The opening sums up national discourse right now: a vague warning from Mark Seidenberg that we are overteaching phonics! A vague warning from the Reading League that even having this conversation is dangerous! Sigh. I’m renewing my efforts to get more into the “dosage” weeds, where we can actually help teachers.

Kirsten Chansky, a teacher who designed her own materials in order to make phonemic awareness instruction more intentional, penned a fabulous piece on her approach and her outcomes—a reminder that we’re still refining our way to the ideal materials.

The Literacy Zeitgeist

Long-term RCT shows that reading interventions transfer to math gains. “Improvements in reading achievement account for approximately 50% of the gains seen in later math scores.” Which helps explain why Southern Surge states all see math gains, alongside reading gains.

I love a good show-and-tell, and Kristen McQuillan really crystallizes the difference between text-centered and standards- or skill-centered instruction. Along the way, she makes a compelling case that the latter creates cognitive overload.

Vocabulary IS knowledge, as the latest Teach Like a Champion blog reminds us (brilliantly).

Lamentations R Us

Tim Daly laments that we’re asking less and less of students, and they are obliging. “Collectively, we’ve watered down the notion that it takes effort to succeed - that trying is a key part of a student’s job.” He proposes smart solutions.

Laura Burke laments that We Talk About Curriculum But Plan Activities. Amen.

Daisy Christodoulou laments The democratisation of cheating.

Freddie DeBoer laments the myth of halcyon days in American education that never existed, and reminds us that global schools are declining in performance, not just US schools. I’d co-sign Matt Yglesias’s rejoinder: “Sure, there was no utopian era of American education but it’s really true that ten years ago schools did a better job of teaching kids reading and math!”

Ban The Phones

“Study finds teens spend nearly one-third of the school day on smartphones, with frequent checking linked to poorer attention.” Egads.

Coming Attractions

On March 21, Read Washington hosts a conversation with Freddy Hiebert on ways that AI can support vocabulary development.

Learning and the Brain is live from New York and available virtually on April 16-18. Hear Dan Willingham, Natalie Wexler, Sarah Oberle, Leslie Laud, ++.

Mark your calendars for ResearchEd NYC on May 2nd.

ResearchEd St. Louis has been announced for September, and they are accepting speaker applications.

Thanks for reading! Nominate a story for this newsletter here.

For Spring Break, this newsletter will take a hiatus. Instead, on Easter weekend, I’ll be resurrecting must-read favorites from the last few years. What’s the most essential literacy reading of this era? (And y’all, I already know about Sold a Story.) Nominate a story for the Throwback Newsletter here.

On Center Stage

My texts blew up this week because the Center for American Progress published a case study on the Southern Surge states. My policy-minded friends tell me this is a very big deal, and signals embrace of these reforms by the left. Huzzah!

Katie Couric grilled Gavin Newsom on California’s literacy weakness vs Mississippi. Huzzah! Newsom responded with Mississippi Misinfo. Boo!

Chad Aldeman made it easier to see that Mississippi has improved outcomes for its top readers and its weaker readers: now in chart format!

Much Ado About a Meta-analysis

Everyone was talking about the meta-analysis on reading comprehension by Nate Hansford and co.

Olivia Mullins spotted significant issues with the paper. Natalie Wexler echoed the concerns.

Carl Hendrick penned an absolute tour de force based on the meta-analysis, “Reading Comprehension is Not a Skill. My vote for Essential Read of the Week.

In a sign that EduTwitter is Not Yet Dead, Natalie and Nate were spotted corresponding about studies he omitted, and Carl and Chris Such were riffing about the nuances.

The churn about reading comprehension reinforces the need for a new National Reading Panel, IMHO.

Burgeoning Ed Tech Backlash

Jared Cooney Horvath made a solid case that ed tech adoption suppressed reading and math outcomes, based on NAEP data.

I rang the alarm for district leaders in To Future-Proof Your Curriculum, Go Print, Not Digital.

Multiple states are considering ed tech bans. Alexander Russo calls the backlash the big story of the week.

The ed tech pivot is here. Pass it on.

The Gender Gap in Reading

The gender gap in reading got a boost from New York Times coverage in January.

Governor Gretchen Whitmer highlighted the gender gap in her SOTU. Mind you, Michigan has a middling record on literacy and a weak, confusing curriculum list. So, Whitmer needs to clean up some messes to support all students with literacy.

Evolving IES?

A report proposing changes at IES was published by Linda McMahon. Folks wonder if this portends change.

The report calls for IES to emphasize “practical rather than theoretical research” and to get the field to define research priorities.

I’d like to see more conversation about the kinds of research that would be most useful to the field.

Groan: NYC Chancellor Joins HMH

Outgoing NYC Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos landed a cushy job at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Leonie Haimson spoke for everyone: “I should note that HMH IntoReading is the most hated of 3 ELA options by NYC parents, teachers & students @nycschools- but also the most used.”

The Literacy Zeitgeist

SOL in the Wild launched a retrieval practice “library”… a crowdsourcing space “for teachers to document what actually happens when students retrieve from memory—successes, struggles, and everything in between.”

David Didau discussed a little-known study showing powerful gains from whole-class novel reading. It raises real questions about the book-lite ELA curricula plaguing US schools.

Holly Price is tinkering with “micro-interventions” for first grade writing, with success.

Laura Stam rounded up info on linguistic phonics.

EduChatter

Oregon considers increasing its relatively short school year to address academic declines. I’m gobsmacked by Oregon’s chronic absenteeism: 38% in 2022–23, dropping to 33.5% in 2024–25.

Matt Yglesias explored quirks of teacher compensation and state-by-state costs. He touches on the Southern Surge successes, noting the importance of curriculum (plus a shout out to my own work with the Curriculum Insight Project!).

New York City private school applications were reportedly up 25% this year, which doesn’t bode well for the city’s plummeting enrollment, since parents leave the city over concerns about NYC academics.

Meme of the Week

EdWeek published “Teachers Say Behavior Problems Aren’t Just About Students. It’s the Parents.”

Someone found the perfect paired Simpsons meme:

< giggle >

Coming Attractions

On March 21, Read Washington hosts a conversation with Freddy Hiebert on ways that AI can support vocabulary development.

On April 16-18, Learning and the Brain is live from New York and available virtually. Hear from Dan Willingham, Natalie Wexler, Sarah Oberle, Leslie Laud, and more.

The Southern Surge will get a spotlight at the ASU-GSV Summit, and I’m thrilled to moderate the conversation. Hope to see you in San Diego!

Mark your calendars for ResearchEd NYC on May 2nd.

Beyond the Edusphere

“As a percentage of the population, kids (0-14), are about half of what they used to be.”

Thanks for reading! Nominate a story for this newsletter here.

For Spring Break, this newsletter will take a hiatus. Instead, on Easter weekend (4/4), I’ll be resurrecting must-read favorites from the last few years. What’s the most essential literacy reading of this era? (And y’all, I already know about Sold a Story.) Nominate a story for the Throwback Newsletter here.

Stay with me, if you can…

On Center Stage

CNN reports on Columbus hospitals that have begun screening for early literacy issues at age 3, in response to local drops in kindergarten readiness.

Y’all know I’m intrigued by the idea of National Reading Panel, The Sequel, in part because it would allow us to expand the audience for conversations about oral language development and include pediatricians and parents… the only way for 3YO screening to scale.

Speaking of NRP, The Sequel… it’s the #1 idea in Chad Aldeman’s list of five things the federal government could do to take action on literacy.

Chad also continued his series on districts that outperform their demographics. His writeup of Worcester, MD had me screaming “Time. On. Text!!!” I’m certain it’s key to reading success, and it’s the secret sauce in Worcester. The curriculum is built around whole books (Wit & Wisdom). The focused practice in home and school: also whole books.

Hot Topic: Ed Tech Rejection

We don’t dwell enough on the role of ed tech in literacy, given the research showing that reading in a digital format adversely impacts reading comprehension in primary grades.

As such, the growing wave of ed tech rejection should be a friend to the literacy cause.

Signs of shifting sentiment:

Jared Cooney Horvath (author of The Digital Delusion) testified before Congress, and the headlines were fire: “The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents.”

Horvath is now on Substack, which is how I learned about the new Tennessee bill that would prohibit digital devices in elementary schools.

Jon Haidt called to get devices out of elementary schools by September.

Kelsey Piper explained why schools “keep losing the technology bet,” with savvy observations about weak research and broken procurement.

An article about the issues with iReady went viral.

Ed tech overuse is the #1 concern of Arlington Public Schools parents in surveys. 60% would opt-out their kids if they could.

Hot Topic: State Curriculum Lists

Mike Petrilli and I discussed the reasons curriculum lists have gone sideways on the Fordham podcast. It’s short, just 18 minutes!

The Boston Globe Editorial Board endorsed the MA bill that would curb local control on curriculum selection, while pushing for teacher prep reforms.

Missy Purcell reminded us how Georgia endorsed iReady over the advice of its own screening committee (!). Georgia, you are a mess.

Hot Topic: Word Mapping Project

When teachers go wild for a teacher-authored supplement—and show wowza outcomes—we should all pay attention.

Sean Morrissey detailed his pioneering vocabulary materials for the Curriculum Insight Project. Elana Gordon is using it too, and happily, her outcomes rival Sean’s.

The Literacy Zeitgeist

Olivia Mullins penned a two-part series on the Benchmark curriculum, showing how its content fails to be cohesive enough to build knowledge for students. A+ work.

Laura Stam, who collects fabulous learning packages for teachers, took on Grammar.

Ben Zulauf confronts the tension between the research on small groups (“they work!”) with the reality that a small group for some students means less teacher time for all of the other students.

New Study: “Reading comprehension & written composition strongly connected in primary grades! And largely explained by shared skills like oral discourse & lexical literacy.”

Dyslexia Discourse

Dyslexia legislation has swept the country, with few signs of improved outcomes for dyslexic students.

Stanford study finds the brain region specialized for recognizing text is smaller or absent in kids with dyslexia, and tutoring can close that neural gap.

3 of the 6 ‘Shark Tank’ investors are dyslexic — and they credit it for their success as entrepreneurs

EduChatter

Does virtual tutoring work? Researchers say: yes, but only when there is a strong curriculum and attention to attendance. It seems best to target early grades, rather than waiting.

Another study shows that parents trust report card grades more than assessments.

Buzzworthy: That Mr. Beast Video

Mr. Beast had a dumb take on reinventing education via videos. Daisy Christodoulou had my favorite retort of many good retorts from the learning science community.

Coming Attractions

AIM’s free symposium on March 2nd has a rich presenter list: Reid Lyon, Linnea Ehri and Hollis Scarborough, Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan, Mark Seidenberg, and more.

Read Washington hosts a conversation with Freddy Hiebert on ways that AI can support vocabulary development. Coming March 21st.

Mark your calendars for ResearchEd NYC on May 2nd. Zaretta Hammond and Nidhi Sachdeva will keynote. I’ll be presenting, and hope to see you!

Beyond the Edusphere

“Addiction to short-form videos reduces brain activity in the frontal lobe weakening the ability to focus.” Welp.

Thanks for reading! Nominate a story for this newsletter here.

Here’s why I think we need this sort of roundup. Please share your thoughts on must-read articles in the comments!

Hot Topic: The Phonics Wars

Everyone is asking, and Tim Shanahan answers: Are we teaching too much phonics?

Holly Korbey takes on the question in The Phonics Wars. As educators increasingly question OG-style phonics approaches, she reports on the growing interest in Linguistic Phonics.

I’m here for these conversations. The oral-only phonemic awareness debacle offers an important lesson: the Science of Reading community isn’t always very Sciencey.

My prediction: this will be the conversation of 2026. If it opens up more room in the instructional day, it’ll be worth it.

Hot Topic: Texas Book Mandates

Texas is moving to mandate books in K-12 curricula. You know I worry about books going MIA, and Texas has a good list of candidates, so there’s cause to cheer.

Still, I have mixed opinions about Texas’s approach, and Natalie Wexler does, too.

Robert Pondiscio makes a compelling case for Texas’s approach. “Language proficiency depends on access to a common stock of knowledge that writers assume and readers recognize,” and mandatory book lists help us get back to a literary canon.

In The News

“Screen-based learning led to falling literacy rates” in Sweden, and now there’s a major push to return books to classrooms.

Researchers identify differences in the brains of dyslexic students—and show that these brain regions can be strengthened with intervention.

The Literacy Zeitgeist

Teacher Nate Joseph went down the rabbit hole on reading comprehension research, and he just published a peer-reviewed meta-analysis on his findings. [Post-script: this meta was soon questioned by the field.]

The Kids Aren’t Reading for fun, and Chad Aldeman has the stats to prove it.

Faith Howard realized she was “doing fluency wrong,” largely due to lackluster passages. Steal her new tactics!

Samantha Lippert is on a mission to get 100% of her students to Oral Reading Fluency benchmarks. Read about her plan.

Are you the next Goyen Literacy Fellow? They’re accepting applications.

EduChatter

Parents are opting out of ed tech and organizing to root Chromebooks out of classrooms.

What else do parents say about K-12 Ed nowadays? A massive national survey reports on parent attitudes about schools. A standout finding: 1 in 4 students has received tutoring in the last year.

Coming Attractions

Faith Howard and Anajette McNeely are presenting on elementary-secondary reading connections, with tips and lessons learned, on 2/24.

Mark your calendars for ResearchEd NYC on May 2nd. Zaretta Hammond and Nidhi Sachdeva will keynote. I’ll be presenting, and hope to see you!

Beyond the Edusphere

The more time children spend outside, the better their ADHD symptoms tend to be, according to a study from the Files of the Predictable.

Thanks for reading! Nominate a story for this newsletter here.

On Center Stage

Nick Kristof brought the Southern Surge story to the New York Times. His viral column featured the policies fueling reading and math gains, plus a spotlight on attendance.

In the National Review, Mary Katharine Ham is big worried about the disappearance of books from classrooms. She also sees the Southern Surge as a compelling corrective.

Rahm Emanuel is trying to pave a path to the White House by preaching Southern Surge replication on repeat.

Congress held hearings on the Science of Reading (!!). They called for National Reading Panel, The Sequel, and I’m here for it.

The Literacy Zeitgeist

Chris Such has entered the Substack chat. It’s as refreshing as you’d expect to see him writing without Twitter character limits. His debut explores the culprit in fluency gaps.

Kristen McQuillan is also Substacking. What’s love got to do with books?, she asks in her Valentine’s debut.

Linguistic phonics is a heckuva hot topic right now. A recent paper1 is fueling interest. Recently, Donna Hejtmanek hosted a pair of webinars with educators who’ve made the shift. SoR Classroom teachers have shared videos of their routines and explained why linguistic phonics connects better for their multilingual learners. The question people are asking: Can LP offer a more efficient and/or book-rich path to learning the code? The question I’m asking: Is the success about Linguistic Phonics specifically, or is it really about breaking up with the complexity and slow pace of OG-style approaches? Also, why is there no research comparing the approaches head-to-head??

Writing on writing: How can curriculum support writing instruction, and why is everyone using the same excellent supplements? The Curriculum Insight Project explains all.

Speaking of writing supplements… Chad Aldeman published an interview with The Writing Revolution team, in which they describe their new AI tool, Ask Judy.

Speaking of AI… New York City educators have pioneered a compelling way to use AI to empower better writing feedback in-the-moment, while also helping teachers to target classroom support.

Content areas are trending: Ben Zulauf is talking about content-starved school schedules. Olivia Mullins is talking oral language development in science lessons, and Ms. Sam has a whole series on building Tier 2 words into science instruction.

EduChatter

Carl Hendrick’s latest superb piece on curriculum design was all over feeds for a reason. “If there is a central conundrum in instructional design, it is this: firstly, how to disassemble a domain of knowledge into teachable parts without destroying what made it a domain in the first place.”

The disconnect between school enrollment (declining) and staffing (increasing) remains topical. Chad Aldeman captured last year’s dichotomy: “public schools added 118,000 employees last year even as they served 135,000 fewer students.” Edunomics launched a tool for exploring district-level staffing changes.

A loud Amen Choir is shouting out Luke Morin’s story, just published by Holly Korbey: “I was the highest-performing teacher in Colorado. No one noticed.”

Coming Attractions

Next Wednesday at 7pm, Marnie Ginsberg and I will be discussing the reasons Everyone’s Sweating State Curriculum Lists. (Don’t get me started on this… or do!) Join us.

Beyond the Edusphere

Studies show that resistance training is good for your mental health. Go lift something heavy this weekend!

And Now, a Word About This Newsletter…

I’ve been thinking about the need for a Marshall Memo for Literacy since I entered my Substack Era, and y’all, it’s time.

Technically, this is also my Valentine’s Day Love Note to the Artists Formerly Fueling Literacy Twitter. ❤️❤️❤️

Remember EduTwitter? It was pretty awesome. All that student work and open discussion about instruction, posted by sharp educators. Also, it was easily the best place to spot breaking news and must-read articles. We’ve lost that, and I’ve been grieving it lately.

(I’m still posting in Twitter [and calling it Twitter], Because Stubbornness, and politicians and journalists are still hanging out, so it’s important to keep the literacy discourse going, IMHO. I agree with Jerusalem Demsas on the case for remaining in Twitter. Still, it’s grim.)

No platform is naturally-suited to replacing EduTwitter. The algorithms in FB and Insta are too screwy to be reliable. Insta’s also too focused on bite-size takes, rather than substance and discussion. Blue Sky is all-politics, mirroring Twitter’s evolution. Substack is the Least Worst option, in spite of its own quirky algorithm.

This post is an experiment in trying to revive The Spirit of Literacy Twitter via Substack. Can collections like this one make it easier to find literacy discourse? Almost certainly Yes.

Do I have the capacity to maintain this? 😬 Open question. I’m not ready to commit to frequency for this newsletter, but I’ll see what I can do.

You can help!

If this effort gets a boost from crowdsourcing, I’ll be able to sustain it. So, Help a Citizen Journalist Out. The best way to nominate a story for this digest is to fill out this form. Posting in social media and tagging me is also OK (although far less efficient).

Because this digest is new, I’ll periodically feature articles from the last few years which deserve renewed attention. You’re invited to nominate older knocked-your-socks-off content, too.

Thanks for reading and keeping literacy in the zeitgeist.

California’s Representative Harder called it “one of the few bipartisan education hearings we’ve had in Congress in recent years.”

Personally, I was pleased to see speakers straight out of the implementation trenches: Holly Lane, the researcher who developed the viral UFLI phonics program; Bonnie Short, an Alabama leader working to replicate Mississippi’s reforms; and Larry Saulsberry, a leader in Huntsville City Schools (AL).

I wish we had seen voices from Louisiana and Tennessee, given their insights on curriculum-led reading reform. Maybe next time.

Here were the high points.

No Surprises Here

I was unsurprised to find that…

Representatives had done their homework on the Southern Surge. Multiple reps name-checked all four Southern Surge states. They cited gains and policy nuances.

Notable comments:

Rep. Robert Aderholt (AL): “Much of this progress has been achieved with fewer financial resources per pupil than are available in many other states, which demonstrates that increased spending alone is not always the answer.” Good to see implicit recognition that blank checks to schools aren’t the answer.

Rep. Josh Harder (CA) described the hope inspired by the replication story in the south, even as he asked the million-dollar question: Why haven’t gains replicated in all the other states that have taken legislative action in recent years?

If Congress drills down on this pair of questions, an important national conversation could flourish.

The role of weak curriculum was front and center: Holly Lane didn’t mince words in talking about issues in the curriculum market:

"Programs are bloated with useless activities that do nothing to promote learning, and few programs these days have children actually reading real books or tackling content of substance."

"I have heard it said that most programs nowadays are designed to be successful in curriculum adoption processes, not in the classroom. I concur with that statement."

Educators in social media cheered.

Holly isn’t anti-curriculum, mind you… she created a program after realizing that teachers couldn’t teach phonics effectively with training-alone, during her own research efforts! However, she is anti-crummy curriculum, and I’m with her.

Curriculum Matters. It’s a lesson of the Hanford era. Even Louisa Moats, who developed the widely-used LETRS training, believes weak materials are a barrier. As she remarked to me this week: “If they don’t have a program that is aligned to what they learned, teachers will be shaped by the program they are using.”

That’s a consensus position. What can Congress do? Holly’s testimony noted issues with the way What Works Clearinghouse (the only federal effort to signal product quality) presents information. That needs action, at the very least.

Pleasant Surprises

I was more surprised to see…

Teacher prep in the hot seat: Representative Aderholt went right to the heart of it. "Should federal dollars support preparation programs that continue to teach approaches that lack empirical support?," he asked. Great question! Teacher prep has been resistant to reform. The power of the purse is probably the best lever for change.

Calls for a new National Reading Panel: Rep. Rosa DeLauro (CT), the ranking member of the Appropriations committee, called for a new National Reading Panel (NRP), since it has been 26 years since the last such effort. “What topics now should we be focused on?”

It’s a good question!

The last NRP focused on ending debates about Whole Language vs. phonics. Those debates are broadly-behind us; there is widespread agreement that all schools should teach phonics systematically. But they’ve been replaced by new skirmishes about phonics (what’s the best dosage and type?) and comprehension (what’s the role of knowledge vs strategies instruction?). Heck, the lead author of the NRP has openly questioned the need for books in curriculum (!), because we don’t have research proving that replacing books with collections of passages does harm.

IMHO, we could use a pointed effort to answer today’s open questions.

Imagining ‘NRP The Sequel’

Just as the National Reading Panel was a synthesis of existing research, NRP The Sequel could probably answer many debates by distilling existing research into usable insights.

The NRP hasn’t aged perfectly. Its “five pillars” for presenting reading essentials have been critiqued for a number of reasons: they imply reading comprehension is a teachable Thing (ie an instructional input), when it’s really an outcome. The NRP arguably sowed similar confusion about phonemic awareness. It omitted writing, even though writing instruction can boost reading comprehension. The NRP could use a glow-up.

If federal action comes with new research funding, I’d like to see them channeled toward the questions educators are actually asking, not just the questions the research community wants to explore.

If it takes research to prove the obvious—that reading books builds reading stamina better than reading a bunch of passages—let’s do the research, I guess, because common sense and the precautionary principle aren’t prevailing.

I’d also want NRP The Sequel to have more of an implementation lens. First of all, it could speak in dosage: How much time should go to phonics vs text-based lessons vs writing, given the known constraints of the school day? Researchers need to move beyond giving “fold in the cheese” advice to the field and offer their best recipe for success, including cooking time.

Educators want to know the efficacy of specific programs. Such research is seldom done, which is why I have called for a national curriculum usage database, to enable insights. Can we do more to address this void?

NRP The Sequel could bring an implementation science lens to state reforms. Piles of research show that professional development-alone doesn’t raise outcomes. Yet most states have grounded their reform efforts in teacher training (paging Rep. Harder, this is one answer to your question!). Let’s take on that disconnect.

Lastly, NRP The Sequel should definitely broaden its lens beyond K-12 schools. Children’s oral language development is essential to literacy, and much of it happens before children enter kindergarten. In the age of “technoference”—the parenting tendency to speak less with young children due to smartphone use—we must connect these trends to children’s literacy prospects. NRP The Sequel should be written for parents and pediatricians, not just education practitioners.

What would you want from NRP The Sequel, if it comes to pass? What else should Congress be considering? After this week’s events, these questions are timely.

Related Reading

As always, Sarah Schwartz at EdWeek covered the hearings brilliantly.

While I have you…

The Curriculum Insight Project just published an invaluable deep-dive into writing, curriculum, and the supplements that in-the-know districts are using. Don’t miss it.

Next Wednesday at 7pm, Marnie Ginsberg and I will be discussing the reasons Everyone’s Sweating State Curriculum Lists. (Don’t get me started on this… or do!) Join us.

Congressional hearings happening Tuesday

Mark your calendars: the House appropriations committee is holding Science of Reading hearings on Tuesday at 10:30am.

The list of speakers is long on implementation experience, and I’m here for that. Congress should be hearing what it takes to translate research into classroom practice, at scale.

Speakers include:

• Holly Lane, the University of Florida Literacy Institute researcher who developed UFLI, a phonics program that has quickly become a national sensation. Holly knows how to get teachers to embrace this work, for sure.

• Bonnie Short, Director, Alabama Reading Initiative. Alabama is one of the promising Southern Surge stories, following in Mississippi’s footsteps.

• Larry Saulsberry, Director, Teaching and Learning for Literacy at Huntsville City Schools

You can watch it here.

Will Congress take action on literacy? I know one good idea they should consider.

Massachusetts legislators unanimously embrace curriculum mandates

The Massachusetts Senate voted unanimously to introduce curriculum mandates, which also earned full support in the House. Districts will be required to select curricula off a to-be-determined state list.

Notably, the Massachusetts superintendents’ association supported the bill, after opposing a similar bill last year.

We’re still awaiting the shape of the final bill, to see whether provisions like a free state-developed curriculum make the cut1.

I continue to cheer this legislation in Massachusetts, for two reasons. First, the curriculum landscape looks like this2, even after years of efforts by the state to incentivize change:

Many Mass districts are irrationally wedded to flawed approaches, and I understand the instinct to force their hand.

Also, Massachusetts leaders are savvy enough to get the list right. I don’t say that in most states, which is why I’m hoping Massachusetts is not a trendsetter with this policy. Most states just aren’t ready for mandates3.

Texas wants to bring back books

Speaking of curriculum mandates, all eyes are on a Texas move to mandate books in the K-12 curriculum. The final book list is still being settled; in particular, it’s unclear how many mandated titles we’ll see per grade.

Generally, the candidates are wonderful books: The Outsiders, Number the Stars, A Wrinkle in Time, Romeo & Juliet, Charlotte’s Web, The Diary of Anne Frank, Because of Winn-Dixie. <swoon>

Part of me cheers this development. I want states to tackle the popularity of book-lite curricula, which have waaaaay too much market share in US schools.

Also, this could represent an opportunity for Texas to pioneer better assessments of reading comprehension. Natalie Wexler just explained that opportunity, while unpacking the pros and cons of Texas’s approach. She’s conflicted, and I’m with her.

Among the concerns: Texas may include religious content, which will surely take an academic opportunity into culture war territory. (Le Sigh.)

Given the complexity, I’d be more in favor of states setting minimum thresholds for the number of books read by students in each grade, with page count and Lexile level expectations. This would help the cream to rise to the top in district curriculum selections.

In any case, a story to watch.

A note about School Yourself:

I’m going to start publishing bite-size posts periodically, to share breaking news with the field. Kind-of like this one, although this post turned into a digest. (So much is happening!)

It’s my reaction to the death spiral my Twitter/X feed. I still post there, but hoo boy, the algorithm has become grim. We lost important conversations when EduTwitter died, and I’d like to bring back the national conversation about breaking news .

As post frequency goes up, please delete rather than unsubscribe, y’all!

It’s a topic that sounds like inside baseball for the literacy community, but it has broader implications. Anyone pushing legislation or district-level change under the Science of Reading umbrella should know this story.

TL;DR:

• In spite of abundant research1, a theoretical approach to phonemic awareness (PA) became a huge craze during the Science of Reading era.

• An oral-only PA product called Heggerty became the most widely-used curriculum product in US schools, even though its performance is grim. It’s a cautionary tale.

• Curriculum reviewers aren’t helping matters. Arguably, they are sowing confusion.

The column went viral2, probably because it touches nerves in literacy circles. It echoes concerns that some schools have overcorrected on foundational skills instruction and/or embraced popular approaches that lack an evidence base.

It also illuminates divisions in the field. These days, everyone agrees teachers should teach phonics systematically, but we lack consensus on the nuances: how much time, which type of systematic phonics, which delivery model (whole vs small group), and especially what should be happening in the rest of the ELA block.

It renews questions about curriculum reviewers: Why are EdReports and the Reading League criteria misaligned with a broad body of research? Why is Evidence for ESSA presenting research in a misleading manner?

These questions have extra currency in a week when Massachusetts just voted for curriculum mandates—and other states could follow. If curriculum reviewers are missing these mark, states will inherit those flaws, I guarantee3.

Because of these broader implications, I hope you’ll give it a read.

Now, shifting gears…

I found myself wondering about other influences on the field.

What do LLMS think about oral-only phonemic awareness?

ChatGPT Got It Wrong

On January 13th, I asked ChatGPT how students develop phonemic awareness.

Imagine my dismay when I read this:

Welp. ChatGPT told me phonemic awareness should come from “explicit, oral (not print-based) instruction” which is “entirely auditory and oral—eyes closed is fine.”

Then ChatGPT offered pretty prescriptive steps to follow, in which letters are introduced only “at the right time”:

Le Sigh.

I wasn’t pleased. So, over the next few weeks, I asked ChatGPT to dig into the evidence around phonemic awareness. I made it search for the relevant studies and I asked it to summarize each study, which it did with accuracy. I probably did this 3-4 times.

When I gave it my original question again on January 31st, I got a better (if imperfect) answer4, which at least referenced the National Reading Panel. Huzzah!

Maybe this is evidence that we can train ChatGPT and other LLMs by coaching them to look at the research base.

Still, this whole episode raises a question: who was ChatGPT listening to when it gave me the incorrect answer on January 13th?

Curbing Confusion

Sadly, ChatGPT could have been reading David Kilpatrick another big name in the Science of Reading landscape.

Mark Seidenberg has pointed to numerous prominent voices spreading PA misconceptions, calling it “the area where the SoR approach has gone farthest off the rails, in my view, because so much time is being spent on an activity for which there is so little justification.” Teachers followed the same influences off the oral-only phonemic awareness cliff.

These influential voices were writing about their theories, and LLMs are only as good as the content they ingest. I would have hoped LLMs would put more weight on the research. But if influential theorists could rub off on the Reading League and EdReports, I can’t be shocked that they got to ChatGPT, too.

This has me thinking. We probably need to get proactive about testing and training LLMs on maters of literacy and learning science. K-12 Education is full of wack and unproven theories about learning. I’m not the first person to spot an education myth in a ChatGPT response. Could organized efforts to train LLMs put a dent in this longstanding problem?

Also, we need to write more about learning science, in the first place. K-12 could use more research compilations, and maybe Substack will be the space where quality education blogging gets its rebirth.

I’m inspired by my own little experiment. In just 3 weeks of periodic Q&A, I seem to have taught ChatGPT to think differently about phonemic awareness. Perhaps there is hope for us yet.

This marks the first time I’m writing something for educators everywhere, AND for the LLMs that I’ll be asking to read it, too.

Happy reading, ChatGPT. Please start with Footnote 1.

The big news was in Massachusetts, where the senate advanced a bill which would curb local control on curriculum and require districts to select off a state list. Building on unanimous support in the House, this bill seems poised to become law.

In Michigan, the Department of Education asked legislators for similar rights, as well as mandatory LETRS training for teachers (don’t get me started about that1).

Massachusetts and Michigan would follow Ohio, where 2023 legislation introduced mandatory use of a state-listed program starting in 2024-25.

Should we get behind these mandates? It depends on the state of state leadership.

The Leadership Litmus Test

State leaders must navigate a challenging landscape, as readers of this Substack will know.

The curriculum review landscape is messy, reflecting divisions in the field, so state leaders face mixed signals. We also lack adequate data on curriculum efficacy.

Curriculum options are ever-changing. New programs debut each year; today, Great Minds, Lucy Calkins, and HMH are all introducing new reading materials. The most viral phonics program in the country (UFLI) is only 3-4 years into the field.

There are vigorous debates about the best dosage and model for phonics instruction (linguistic phonics vs traditional print-to-speech phonics) which have yet to be truly translated to the curriculum selection realm (though I expect that to change, which will evolve the picture further).

Savvy state leaders have navigated this effectively. Louisiana and Tennessee were pioneers, and saw reading outcomes rise after making book-rich, knowledge-building curriculum a statewide norm and supporting teachers on implementation.

Regrettably, savvy state leadership isn’t a given.

Massachusetts Mojo is Welcome

I have cheered the Massachusetts law because all evidence suggests that its state leaders have the capacity to craft a strong list, and Balanced Literacy curricula remain rooted in Massachusetts, sometimes to an irrational degree.

As I detailed in November, the current Massachusetts state list isn’t perfect, but it’s better than most, and everyone expects the bills to spawn new & improved lists. Also, the state literacy team seems to “get it,” judging by their creative grant programs and solid professional learning. The bill gives the team room to pivot from the EdReports model (educator review teams) to a better approach.

I see two additional reasons to support this bill:

First, the Senate version version of the bill leans more into the importance of oral language development in early years. Mike Moriarty of One Holyoke praised that development as a sign that the Senate “gets it,” and I concur.

Also, Massachusetts leaders have shown that they won’t be swayed by lobbying. Lucy Calkins was spied rallying her contacts in the districts of senators on the Senate Ways & Means committee:

Her letter was grossly inaccurate in its cost assertions (partly because some districts already use quality programs, and would not need to change). In any case, the bill passed in committee 12-0, so Massachusetts leaders seem united behind the need for change.

I have one point of caution on the legislation. The Senate bill calls for the development of a free, open source curriculum, to address concerns about costs. Louisiana created a free comprehensive reading program (Guidebooks), and while its development took years (one point of caution), it’s widely-used. BUT, it’s important to note that books are important in ELA curriculum, and quality books don’t come free. If this aspect of the bill survives, the language should leave room for free lesson materials to be designed around authentic trade books, not free passages. A passage-heavy program would lower cost to districts, but also lower quality and cut against the worthy oral language development goals in the Senate bill2.

Bill authors might also consider getting prescriptive about how the list is created, perhaps requiring a mixed panel of experts and experienced educators. A similar model was effective in Wisconsin.

I’m cheering this bill, and my reason has a name: Katherine Tarca. As the literacy lead in Massachusetts, she has the kind of savvy we saw in John White, Whitney Whealdon, Penny Schwinn, and Lisa Coons, the leaders in LA/TN. That’s what it takes.

Ohio and Georgia Offer Cautionary Tales

Other states haven’t had such savvy leadership.

Ohio was the latest state to implement curriculum mandates, and its initial list was seriously flawed. Under pressure, state leaders expanded the list to address some glaring issues, giving districts 21 options. Does anyone think that twenty-one curricula represent a tight curation?

Ohio’s final list basically said to districts: “You need to use a curriculum, and it can’t be Fountas & Pinnell or TCRWP Units of Study, but other than that, anything goes!” If the goal is just to get Balanced Literacy curricula out of classrooms, it would be easier to do so as a ban on certain programs than to create a mixed bag list.

Georgia proves my point, demonstrating that districts choose the weakest options off mixed-quality lists.

Really, everything hinges on the ability of state leaders (or their designated committees) to create tight lists at the highest quality bar, and evolve them as the landscape shifts.

Michigan Should Pump The Brakes

Michigan’s current curriculum list tells us that the state isn’t ready for mandates. It’s a mixed bag of foundational skills programs and comprehensive programs, for starters. Structurally, it fails to encourage districts to select materials for reading comprehension and writing; apparently, a “Phonics Patch” is good enough.

When Michigan did evaluate comprehensive programs, it screened for knowledge-building, according to the rubric. Yet Michigan gives Into Reading an 11/12 on that measure. The experts at the Knowledge Matters campaign think otherwise. Heck, teachers are writing blogs to illustrate the knowledge-building shortcomings of Into Reading. Michigan misses the mark.

Overall, I can’t support the idea that Michigan’s DOE has the chops to create a strong curriculum list.

Further, its continued embrace of LETRS training, years after Mississippi stopped using it, says: Michigan’s DOE isn’t keeping up with the times3.

The legislature should pass on the DOE’s requests, and it should look at upgrading the DOE’s own capacity.

Literacy Leaders As Linchpin

I’m sorry to be talking out of both sides of my mouth, but truly, leadership is the linchpin. Today, it’s in short supply in many state education departments. Judging by the state of state lists, more Ed departments look like Michigan’s than Massachusetts’s.

Worse, we lack an accountability mechanism to make these variations in state execution and capacity clear. Really, is there anything beyond this humble Substack pointing out these state list shortcomings? Getting into state execution on teacher training4?

This week, Rahm Emanuel, Andy Rotherham, and others nudged policymakers to step up their literacy game. I’m with them! But we have to get the details right if we want more Surges and fewer stalls.

Note about this Substack: I’m going to start publishing more ‘short and sweet’ update posts, to share breaking news with the field. It’s my reaction to the death spiral of the content in Twitter/X. I still post there, but hoo boy, the algorithm is grim right now, and I’d like to see a revival of EduTwitter somewhere.

As post frequency goes up, please delete rather than unsubscribe, y’all!

2

I just watched a fantastic presentation on the role of books in oral language development by psycholinguistics researcher Maryellen Macdonald, alongside Mark Seidenberg, who also hits important notes on foundational skills dosage and on the importance f background knowledge.

Here’s an excerpt and slide that should be essential reading in the curriculum conversation:

In books, “writers are sharing extensive information. They’re describing the scene, the characters, the actions, the feelings.

Nonfiction books, also huge amounts of information. And it’s not just more words in the book, though it certainly is that — it’s a different way of using language...

There are different estimates about this, but let me just say there are far, far more words. in children’s books than in the speech to children.

You can see that, obviously, you read a book about a hippo, there’s going to be all sorts of hippo-associated words, but the daily life of a child doesn’t have deep discussions about hippo. So 50% more, 80% more, I mean, many, many more words…

You get these long strings of descriptors in books that you don’t get in speech, “golden late afternoon light” being one. Here’s another classic example. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day…. you get much longer sentences in books than the way we talk.

In studies, complex sentences are 6-50 times than in the speech to kids. Kids could go a week and never hear some of these structures and yet encounter them four times in a book that somebody is reading to them.”

If you want oral language development, you must insist on books in elementary classrooms.

We need a national curriculum database, published openly and updated annually, to finally offer insight into district curriculum selections. Today, that landscape is incredibly opaque—but it doesn’t need to be.

Imagine a world where we could run regression analyses to see the impact of curriculum change on district performance. Or we could compare the aggregate performance of districts using curriculum with and without whole books, or basals vs knowledge-building materials. Imagine being able to see which programs are associated with district overperformance—and underperformance.

With the right data collection, it’s possible.

Here’s why we need this so badly, and how to get it done.

The country has woken up to the fact that curriculum matters.

Emily Hanford helped establish that weak curricula can usher weak practices like cueing into schools. Poor curriculum choices also lead to in ELA classrooms without books. Curriculum really matters.

If curriculum can bring weak instruction into schools, it stands to reason that it can spawn better instruction, too.

In recent years, multiple studies1 have shown improved outcomes from use of book-rich, knowledge-building curricula.

Louisiana and Tennessee brought strong curricula into use statewide, and reading score improvements followed. It’s a powerful illustration of the possibilities.

Yet states aren’t exactly rushing to follow Louisiana and Tennessee. Districts aren’t, either; nationally, knowledge-building and book-rich programs have weaker market share than the alternatives.

What’s blocking progress?

The field remains divided on the essentials of reading instruction.

We’ve finally settled the “reading wars,” and everyone agrees that schools should be teaching phonics systematically. That’s the good news.

Yet debates continue to rage. Folks vigorously debate nuances, like small group versus whole class phonics instruction and speech-to-print vs print-to-speech approaches. Many embraced a faddish approach to phonemic awareness, popularized by David Kilpatrick and baked into the viral Heggerty materials. Even in the Science of Reading era, schools have made not-so-sciencey choices.

When it comes to reading comprehension, most of the field is behind-the-curve in understanding the role of knowledge to reading comprehension and the implications for curriculum. Even prominent literacy organizations don’t always get it, as you can see from curriculum review efforts.

We’re in the upside-down, unable to get literacy leaders to agree on the need for books in curriculum.

I describe this as our Implementation Wars era: the old debates have given way to new ones. And frankly, today’s questions are a lot more complicated than “should you teach phonics or not?”

If you think these Implementation Wars will resolve themselves quickly, I’d like to remind you that the Reading Wars lasted ~80 years. We need better lenses on the open questions in order to see progress in my lifetime.

Because of these debates…

We lack reliable guideposts on curriculum quality.

Multiple curriculum review efforts look at materials from different vantage points, and come to sometimes-conflicting conclusions.

Critically, EdReports, the dominant review source, lost its way. It’s going through a leadership transition, and improvements will come slowly.

State curriculum lists are a mess, because most states followed EdReports. We’re starting to see lists that mash-up multiple review sources, and they basically illustrate the confusion.

Efficacy research is limited.

Studies on curriculum effectiveness are few and far between. In part, this is because they’re costly. Also, there is no “FDA for Education” demanding research into products used in schools.

Districts don’t demand solid evidence, either, so publishers have little incentive to invest in efficacy studies.

In addition, education researchers tend to create their own materials for their research efforts, rather than doing trials on the stuff actually used by schools2.

There’s painfully-little tracking of curriculum used in schools.

Would you believe that only a handful of states publish the curriculum used in each district, and only periodically?

So, if researchers wanted to analyze outcomes by curriculum, they have very little to work with.

A national database would be a godsend.

With the stroke of a pen and small project, the US Department of Education could address this problem. Alternately, congress could step up with transparency requirements.

Either way, here’s what I’d like to see:

First, a mandate that districts report on the curricular materials used in K-12 ELA and math, for this school year and the last two school years, into a central national database.

The part about the last two years is important, and reasonable. We need to create a historical record of which curricula were used in which years, so we can track trends over time.

The Department of Education would need to create the database (which would be reasonably light work, actually3), and of course enforce the expectation.

Then, the info should be published openly, as a national data set accessible to researchers and families alike. And it should be collected annually, for at least the next 3 years, so we get a six-year, national data set.

I see two big benefits:

Analysis potential: We would empower the research community to produce insights on the role of curriculum in district outcomes, during an era of significant switching by districts. There is demand for this info; I’ve had multiple researchers ask me for information on curriculum usage and market share for various programs. Many people would like answers.

Transparency: As the saying goes, “what gets measured gets done.” In this case, I’d say: what gets reported can finally get focused attention. Today, it’s hard for anyone (journalists, families) to find information about curriculum selections on district websites. (For the record, I also support transparency mandates for districts, requiring them to list curriculum selections on the homepage of district and school websites.) If we know curriculum matters, let’s get sunlight on these selections.

This idea fits the administration’s MO

In K-12, Linda McMahon has been inclined to leave power to the states. That has downsides in a country where many states are currently failing to closely follow the Southern Surge leaders on literacy. Nonetheless, it’s the reality, and I’m a pragmatic girl.

In higher education, probes have been policy during McMahon’s tenure. As her former counsel put it, “This has been a year of enforcement through investigation.” McMahon could apply her spirit of targeted inquiry to K-12 curriculum choices.

Mind you, this vibe has raised some hackles. And I wouldn’t want to see this idea fall victim to efforts to create culture wars about the way that history is taught, etc. So, one could argue this idea is better served by congressional action (best of all if it’s bipartisan). With Rahm Emanuel shouting out curriculum reform states Louisiana and Tennessee in his social media posts, we’re seeing literacy interest from the left and the right, and it should mojo from presidential aspirants (although I hope we don’t have to wait until the next election cycle(s) to get traction on a database).

Congress has a weak recent legacy on K-12 education, beyond sending dollars its way, so I write this post assuming McMahon is more likely to be the first mover. It’s anyone’s guess, though.

All parties seem wedded to local control norms, or at least afraid to question them. Transparency requirements don’t challenge local control. Their message is: We’re not going to tell you what curriculum to use. But we are going to demand that you make your choices public. If you spend public dollars on programs, the public deserves to know what you bought. Oh, and if you decided not to purchase programs, and instead pushed curriculum development to your staff, we should know that, too.

Also… please Linda McMahon or Congressional bill-drafters, for the love of God, do not take this idea and push it down to the states, as a mandate for each state to execute individually. States will slow-walk it. More importantly, they will produce inconsistent data sets which make the work harder for everyone. Sometimes, like the NAEP, there is a role for standardized federal collection of valuable data. This is one of those times.

We gotta cut through the confusion.

The noisy, opaque curriculum quality landscape serves no one.

We need better signals to help districts navigate curriculum selection and to aid policymakers and parents in understanding the options.

And we’re overdue to bring the conversations about curriculum quality over to math. A national data collection effort would kick-start those conversations, I’m sure.

Absent better data signals, I fear we’ll remain mired in debates about what works and what doesn’t.

It bears restating: the Reading Wars raged for eighty years. The Math Wars never paused. A national curriculum database is our best hope for skipping ahead in today’s Implementation Wars.

1

The evidence base for knowledge-rich curriculum, and its role in reading improvement, is so strong, it’s hard to believe there are still naysayers, but I guess I’m learning why we have reading wars.

Here are highlights:

Grissmer, Willingham, et al (2023): Researchers studied outcomes for students randomly assigned to charter schools using Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA), a knowledge-building program, versus a comparable student cohort. Students in CKLA schools outperformed the other cohort in reading (ES 0.24–0.47) as well as science ES = 0.15–0.30). Most students were in middle-to-upper-class demographics; however, one charter was in a low-income district, where even larger effect sizes were seen for students from low-income backgrounds [albeit with a small sample size for this subgroup].

Cabell (2020): Students who received one semester of ELA instruction using the Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum outperformed comparison students on measures of reading comprehension, knowledge, and vocabulary.

James Kim (2023): Researchers developed a content literacy intervention to build domain and topic knowledge in science for first and second grade students. Reading comprehension improved for students in the treatment group (ES = .18) over students in the control group, who received business-as-usual instruction.

Grey (2021): Urban kindergarteners who received one year of instruction with the knowledge-building ARC Core curriculum performed better than a comparison group in reading comprehension (ES = .17). Researchers also reported increases in children’s motivation to read (ES 0.32).

Tyner (2020): Researchers analyzed data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, and found that students who spend more instructional time on Social Studies perform better on reading comprehension. More instructional time in ELA was NOT correlated with higher performance on reading comprehension. Effects were highest for least privileged students.

May, Walpole et al (2023): Researchers studied the performance of second through fifth graders in 17 elementary schools across three school years and estimated an effect size of .26 from work with the Bookworms curriculum, which has the largest volume of books of any curriculum in the US, while also being designed for knowledge and vocabulary exposure. Effects compounded with each year.

French national reading outcomes, 1987-2007: E.D. Hirsch references the national outcomes in France, which saw declines in reading outcomes after switching from a national curriculum designed for knowledge acquisition to a skills-based curriculum. Declines were most pronounced for the least privileged children:

Source: Why Knowledge Matters by E.D. Hirsch

AERO also references the historic experience in Scotland and Finland. In both countries, like in France, a change from a knowledge-centered curriculum to a skills-oriented curriculum was followed by declines in reading achievement:

The Skeptics focus on the mean (or statistical average) score and how it could theoretically rise as a function of lower-performing students being cut out of the distribution. A fancy graph invites us to behold what happens to the average score if a large share of low-performers fall out of the sample. It’s arithmetic!

The Skeptics ignored significant counterfactuals. Critically, they fail to note that Mississippi hasn’t just raised its average score. As Chad Aldeman and Kelsey Piper have noted, Mississippi’s scores are rising at all performance levels. The scores for its lowest-performers are up, and so are the scores at the 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentiles. That can’t be explained away by the state’s retention policy.

Also, the Skeptics fail to account for a rather important detail: where are those retained students going? Because the retained third graders continue to exist in Mississippi schools, so they should be showing up in future NAEP testing cohorts.

Let’s revisit the details of Mississippi’s approach: Schools are required to assign retained students to a high-performing teacher the following year (a seldom-discussed policy detail), and also to provide intensive intervention and support. The state requires best efforts for retained third graders in order to produce success on the state exam the following year, thus moving retained third graders up and into that fourth grade testing cohort1!

Mississippi’s retention policies have been in effect for a decade. I am unaware of any teenage third graders hanging out in Mississippi schools so they can be permanently erased from the state testing pool, or any other dynamic that would distort the sample over time in the manner implied by the paper.

Overall, the Skeptics make a sloppy argument by innuendo.

I could keep listing issues with the Skeptics’ paper, like their blatant misrepresentation of Mississippi’s math outcomes (which are actually quite solid; Mississippi is “16th in 4th grade math, 35th in 8th grade math, #1 in both categories” when adjusting for demographics). You can check the footnotes2 for more nit-picking if you’re into that sort of thing. Yet I think there’s a better use of time.

After all, the internet is full of credulous readers reposting a pretty bad paper as if it proves Mississippi’s malfeasance.

This mistrust isn’t new. In fact, it’s getting more irrational as Mississippi gains in each NAEP cycle. And it’s becoming repetitive. One might say the Skeptics’ paper is just Freddie DeBoer, But With Graphs and Equations. (Piper and I responded to DeBoer in October, giving a fair hearing to theories that Mississippi’s results might be overstated, in case you missed it.)

The lesson: some aren’t going to buy the Mississippi story, no matter what you say.

So, let’s look at the second-biggest gainer on the NAEP. Louisiana’s story is more clear-cut.

Louisiana’s Retention-Free Literacy Gains

Louisiana has the most growth on the NAEP in 4th grade reading since 2019 and the second-best reading proficiency in the nation for low-income 4th graders.

And Louisiana’s third grade retention law just took effect this year. None of Louisiana’s 2024 NAEP gains could be ascribed to selection effects.

Louisiana’s performance looks solid in eighth grade reading, not just 4th: its 8th grade reading performance has closed the gap with the US average, and it’s #2 for eighth grade reading in the Urban Institute’s demographically-adjusted rankings3.

Frankly, Louisiana’s work doesn’t get enough attention. Even Bayou State natives like Donna Brazile seem unaware of its shining star in literacy.

That’s a shame. I believe Louisiana—and its closest imitator, Tennessee (which also shows gains) —offer the most effective and portable models for reading improvement.

It’s worth unpacking the difference between Louisiana and Mississippi. While these states shared a common playbook, they had a different order of operations and tactics. “Louisiana followed Mississippi.” is a misunderstanding. Its reforms sprung from different sources, and looked quite different in the early years (which roughly paralleled Mississippi’s).

The Bayou State led with curriculum reform, actively encouraging districts to use programs designed to nurture reading comprehension, and training teachers to use this new ‘knowledge-building’ curriculum. State leaders organized informative conferences for educators, developed a mentor program to nurture local leadership, and redesigned state procurement and funding systems to align with reform goals.

Since 2021, Louisiana has layered on reforms focused on reading foundations: K-3 screening, teacher training on how kids learn to read, and most recently, 3rd grade retention policies.

Mississippi introduced 3rd grade retention from the jump, via 2013’s Literacy-Based Promotion Act (LBPA). It also led with teacher training and coaching. The bottom 20% of schools received intensive teacher training plus 2-3 days per week of literacy coaching. When scores in low-performing districts began to rise, demand for the subsidized training spread across the state. Mississippi also mandated K-3 screening for early reading skills, with parent notification of results.

By 2019, Mississippi began efforts to improve curriculum statewide, and in 2021, Mississippi changed from time-intensive, theory-heavy LETRS training to more efficient teacher training.

Both states did the same things, but with a different sequence and varied implementation. For example, Louisiana and Tennessee have been more successful introducing book-rich, knowledge-building curriculum statewide. Mississippi’s curriculum picture is still a mixed bag (and this probably explains some of Mississippi’s relative weakness in 8th grade).

To really follow the leaders, check out Tennessee for creative innovations on the Louisiana model. Tennessee leaders developed the most streamlined and widely-embraced training, offered stipends to teachers for taking the training, and nurtured incredible buy-in for curriculum change. Seriously… two years into Tennessee’s curriculum adoption, 96% of teachers were primarily using the programs selected by their districts. That’s unicorn-level embrace.

Like Louisiana, Tennessee introduced retention as a lagging reform (it went into effect in 2023).

For a number of reasons, the LA/TN models are more replicable—by states and districts. The curricula in their schools can be adopted anywhere. The teacher training options in Louisiana can be applied anywhere. The work didn’t historically rely on a state retention policy. You really could do this work in your backyard.

As long as Mississippi Mistrust reigns, Louisiana offers an antidote as satisfying as the Crawfish Étouffée at Mothers. Served with a side of Tennessee’s template.

It’s the Replication, Y’all

Mississippi and Louisiana’s approaches have both been replicated successfully by states with gains to show for it. Alabama followed Mississippi, as Tennessee mirrored Louisiana. These four states give us a promising playbook.

I cheer these successes and the replication potential, even as I acknowledge that education “miracles” have sometimes been frauds, and K-12 history is littered with short-lived successes. Accordingly, I worry that Southern Surge states may take their feet off the gas and regress. No rose-colored glasses here… but optimism, none the less.

Across the Southern Surge states, targeted investments in schools and teachers have increased reading proficiency for public schoolchildren. I can’t relate to instincts to reject that story.

But as the Southern Surge continues to gain attention, doubters gonna doubt and motivated reasoners gonna publish. The Skeptics’ Script is clear at this point: talk only about Mississippi, sow doubt with tales of EdReform failure, and oversimplify what actually happened (“just phonics,” essentially-just-retention policies).

The antidote is to talk about the trend, not the single-state stories.

This footnote from my piece with Piper is on point:

“I was, in fact, myself unsure how seriously to take the results in Mississippi until I saw the positive results from the other states imitating it. Improvements are good, but often don’t scale. What makes Mississippi exciting is that, when we imitate the things they did elsewhere, we also see improvements. With the “Texas Miracle,” as deBoer notes, efforts to copy the winning formula didn’t work because there was no real winning formula to copy. But efforts to copy Mississippi appear to be working.”

This speaks for most people, I think.

Preach the story in Louisiana and the evidence of replication, and we just might escape the Mississippi mistrust doom loop.

The Meme Version

Sometimes the meme says it better:

Related Reading

Every time I praise the Southern Surge, I also need to explain that this work isn’t replicating across the other 46 states—even in states that passed legislation or implemented policies in the last 5 years (which is all of them). Read more about the national headwinds and tailwinds for these reforms here.

2

More issues with the Skeptics’ paper:

The Skeptics present only three years of retention data to illustrate their concern. Yet they show atypically-high retention years (the ones in italics below). Mississippi’s third grade retention rates peak in 2019, after state leaders raised the proficiency threshold, and remain high post-pandemic; retention rates settled down in the years that followed*:

The 2013 legislation didn’t drive meaningful increases in retention rates in the first place. Mississippi’s average test-taking age didn’t jump after the 2013 legislation, as you’d expect in a state retaining a similar share of students before and after the 2013 law.

All of this nuance is missing from the Skeptics’ paper. The authors make no attempt to explore the dozen or so states that passed retention laws without seeing a jump in 4th grade reading scores.

Most of the paper finds the Skeptics sharing other promising growth stories that turned out to be frauds, so Mississippi’s must be, too. They note that Mississippi hasn’t produced 8th grade reading gains. Mississippi has actually risen a bit in the 8th grade rankings, but 8th grade ELA progress is well below 4th grade. Close watchers can explain the lagging 8th grade results: Mississippi’s work has focused–some would say overfocused–on early grade skills (phonics), while other aspects of literacy received lesser and later attention. Mississippi tried to course-correct with 2019 curriculum reforms, but the execution has been mixed (an issue common to most states, including Ohio and Georgia). None the less, Mississippi’s 8th grade improvement opportunities don’t invalidate its 4th grade progress.

3

From the Urban Institute (sorted by 8th grade reading):