Louisa Moats was at a conference in Daphne, Ala., earlier this year when she was approached by a group of teachers. For the 81-year-old, this was a relatively new occurrence. I get that a lot now.” Moats has become a late-in-life heroine, at least in some circles, because of a teacher-training program she wrote decades ago that has become a buzzy property.
She is not exactly basking in the attention. For a long time, Moats found herself on the losing side of America’s so-called reading wars, the back-and-forth over the best way to teach kids to read. She and her cohort of researchers promote the idea that reading is a skill that must be painstakingly taught, first through an understanding of the way sounds make up speech and get represented as letters, then through explicit instruction on how language works.
But the prevailing view, until a few years ago, was that most children would figure out how to decode the letters if given enough encouragement, stimulating material, and context clues, just as they do with speech. One explanation she has landed on: people did not keep up with the research. About 4 in 10 American children have not mastered basic reading-comprehension skills by fourth grade, the worst result in 20 years, according to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
A third of eighth-graders also fall below the reading level expected for their age. The average 12th-grader scores three points lower on a reading test than his or her peers did in 2019, and 10 points lower than those from 1992. Some of that can be laid at the door of school closures during the pandemic.
But it’s a problem with deeper roots: roughly a quarter of young adults (16 to 24) are functionally illiterate, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Professors bemoan having to assign ever-shorter reading assignments. Time-use surveys report that people from 20 to 34 spend no more than 10 minutes a day reading for pleasure.
Grave declarations have proclaimed the “end of reading.” To combat the decline, states have looked to the few education districts where students are showing improvement and followed their example by enacting what are known as science-of-reading laws. The laws, which have been passed in 42 states and D.C., mostly in the past seven years, mandate that schools use very structured techniques—including foundational instruction on phonics. Many teachers did not learn this approach in college and have to be retrained.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
