Illiteracy Is a Policy Choice
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that widespread illiteracy among school-age children is not inevitable — it's the result of policy decisions that can be reversed.
Key Takeaways
- We know how to teach reading - The science of reading provides a clear evidence base for effective literacy instruction
- Mississippi proved it's possible - The 'Mississippi Miracle' showed that policy changes focused on phonics-based instruction produce dramatic results
- Illiteracy is a choice we're making - When students can't read, it's because we chose not to implement what works
Transcript
illiteracy is a policy choice.
Journalist Kelsey Piper says in a lot of cases, you would actually be better moving from California to Mississippi to attend the excellent public schools there.
And what she's talking about is a set of policy choices that Mississippi has been making for more than a dozen years now that have caused their reading performance, specifically on fourth grade NAEP, the nation's report card, to just go up and up and up.
And you can see on this graph that Mississippi has passed the national average, it has passed California, California has gone down, the national average has gone down, Massachusetts has gone down, and Mississippi may soon eclipse Massachusetts as well.
Mississippi is spending a lot less than states like California and Massachusetts and getting durably superior results.
This is not a fluke.
This is not something that just happened one time.
And this is not a test that can be easily gained.
There is something real here.
that Mississippi is doing.
And we'll talk about what that is.
And unsurprisingly, part of the story is phonics.
You have no doubt heard the Soul to Story podcast from Emily Hanford, where she goes into the importance of phonics and explains why phonics is often overlooked and under-emphasized.
And there's a huge opportunity there, certainly, around phonics.
But Kelsey Piper's article in The Argument identifies three factors that go beyond phonics, the first of which is state-level mandated or strongly suggested and very well supported curriculum for teaching literacy that is based on the science of reading.
And in the states that are being the most successful, which especially are the southern states, Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, The emphasis on curriculum can't be overstated.
The states are getting involved.
They're not leaving it up to individual teachers or individual districts.
And they're saying in sometimes fairly heavy handed ways, this is what you need to be doing to ensure that all students learn how to read.
And those guidelines tend to be fairly well aligned with the science of reading.
The second thing that they're doing at the state level is providing in-depth teacher training on the specific curriculum that teachers are being provided so there's a lot of opportunity for teachers to learn how to teach this curriculum effectively and then the third piece is accountability and this one you know people would like to believe that that's not necessary that it's not helpful but it seems to be that there needs to be some account accountability especially for adults to make sure that students get the support they need and one interesting policy That's been getting a lot of attention this year is third grade retention.
The idea that you can't promote a student to third grade if they cannot read, if they cannot pass a particular reading assessment.
And the explanations that I've seen for why that works have to do with adult behavior.
That when adults are not allowed to pass a student on to the next grade, they realize the consequences of retention are pretty dramatic.
So they do whatever it takes.
They pull out all the stops in order to get those students up to where they need to be in reading.