Most experts admit there is a problem with how reading is taught in this country.
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 65% of fourth graders in the U.S. can’t read at grade level. When you start breaking it down into groups, it gets even worse. Eighty percent of Hispanic fourth graders are not at grade level while for Black students it is 84%.
When it comes to what went wrong, some experts blame how we have been teaching reading for the past couple of decades. In the 1980s, American public schools transitioned to whole language learning, which teaches kids to recognize whole words. Students use context clues like pictures to identify words and decide if that is what is being used in the sentence. They can also use context clues in the sentence to figure out which word would be used.
Some experts say that approach has left kids unable to recognize new words. Now there is a shift to something called “the science of reading,” which refers to research into how a child’s brain learns to read. There is a larger emphasis on phonics, which breaks words down into their individual sounds, teaching children to decode words instead of memorizing them. Not all educators agree on this approach but in recent years, major school districts have made the transition.
It will take some time to see if it works.