Editor’s note: This essay is an entry in Fordham’s 2025 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to answer this question: “What needs to happen next—at the state, district, and school levels—for the science of reading revolution to fulfill its promise and ensure that far more children learn to read well?” Learn more.
Walk into a first-grade room on a Tuesday, and the work is wonderfully ordinary: sounds blended aloud, letter-sound practice, kids reading decodable books with proud little smiles, a quick jot of a sentence. That’s where reading grows. Headlines and new laws can spark momentum, but they don’t change what happens between 9:00 and 10:30 a.m.—high-quality materials, expert coaching, protected time, and clear feedback do. And when those pieces line up, results move.
The good news: Places that have aligned those pieces are seeing real gains—what some call the “Southern Surge.” Louisiana reported a 17-point increase in the percentage of K–3 students reading on or above grade level from Fall to Spring 2024–25, after publishing statewide screening results and pushing implementation supports with full-time reading coaches in every elementary school (LA DOE, 2025). Mississippi set a record with 77.3 percent of third graders passing the state reading test on the first attempt this spring. Its fourth-grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading results are now above the national average—signs of durable gains when curriculum materials, dedicated time, expert coaching, and honest data align (MS DOE, 2025).
The next phase of the science-of-reading (SoR) revolution is simple to say and hard to do: States must set tight guardrails, districts must build coherent engines, and schools must deliver predictable, high-quality routines—every day, for every student. Below, I outline what needs to happen next, pairing each level with fresh exemplars from the last year.
A crucial note up front: SoR is not “phonics-only.” Research definitively shows that knowledge is even more important than overall reading ability or IQ for comprehension. The famous “baseball study” found that seventh graders with low reading skills but high baseball knowledge outperformed strong readers who lacked that domain knowledge. Students need both the code and the content—foundational skills married to systematic knowledge building from day one. That’s the through line of successful implementation, not just a theory.
1) States: Tighten guardrails, fund the work, verify fidelity
Adopt and fund a coherent instructional package
States must publish short, evidence-vetted lists of high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) for both foundational skills and knowledge building. This means curricula rich in science and social studies content, explicit vocabulary instruction, and sentence-level writing practice. Teacher-preparation programs need approval tied to demonstrated classroom skills—can candidates diagnose decoding errors and choose the correct instructional response? And critically, states must fund these materials, job-embedded coaching, and universal screening so guidance isn’t an unfunded mandate. Louisiana’s approach—screeners, statewide dashboards, and public K–3 updates—shows how transparency and support can move aggregates within a single year. When support and transparency move together, aggregates move faster.
Measure what matters and publish it
Universal K–3 screening three times per year should feed into a standard data format that flows to public dashboards, showing both growth and the dosage of interventions—the actual minutes students receive. Louisiana’s spring screener release models are accessible, statewide reporting that creates productive urgency without shame.
Mind the mechanics of promotion policies
Retention rules must pair with real services—summer programs with high-dosage tutoring that teach children, not just assess and hold them back. Louisiana’s 2023 law sets a third-grade promotion standard while specifying and funding corresponding services. Mississippi’s decade of implementing the Literacy-Based Promotion Act pairs standards with retest options and good-cause exemptions, showing how accountability can coexist with flexibility.
Build human capital at scale
States should fund coaching standards with caseloads no larger than 15 teachers, enabling weekly model-practice-feedback cycles tied to the adopted core. Mississippi’s sustained NAEP trajectory—now above the U.S. average in grade-four reading—reflects long-term alignment of professional learning, cohesive materials, and expert supervision.
2) Districts: Build the engine—materials, time, people, and monitoring
Choose one core and align everything to it
Coherence beats choice. Districts must adopt a single evidence-aligned foundational program plus a knowledge-building curriculum that stays on topics for weeks at a time. Research shows word learning occurs up to four times faster when the verbal context is familiar. Instead of jumping from baseball one day to the moon the next, effective programs dive deep into themes—spending weeks on topics like animal habitats or weather systems, allowing vocabulary and concepts to recur with increasing depth. Add decodables matching the phonics scope-and-sequence, morphology resources from grade three up, and a writing sequence building sentence-level control. Don’t skip lessons—use materials built in an effective progression.
Protect minutes in the master schedule
Guarantee 90–120 minutes daily for K–3 core literacy instruction and 30–45 minutes for targeted small-group intervention. Here’s the crucial insight: an additional 30 minutes of daily social studies instruction has been shown to increase reading ability by 15 percent of a standard deviation, with the most significant benefits for students from less-affluent families. This time isn’t competing with reading—it’s building the knowledge foundation that makes reading possible.
Make coaching the daily accelerator
Define the coach role tightly: Observe classrooms regularly for explicit modeling and high student response rates, run short feedback cycles, and when needed, demonstrate master lessons with students so exemplars can be experienced and implemented. Principals must protect this time—skill grows where feedback is routine.
Monitor growth, not just status
Track progress-monitoring data and publish school-level growth dashboards centered on identifying student strengths. Use them to strategically allocate staff time. Bossier Parish (LA) exemplifies this approach: Over 70 percent of K–3 students scored on or above grade-level benchmarks at the end of 2025, seven points above the state rate, after a year of focused implementation, communication, and refinement.
3) Schools: Deliver predictable, high-quality routines—every day
Teach the whole reading “rope” with structured routines
Reading isn’t innate; the brain must map graphemes to phonemes then connect to meaning. But here’s what research makes crystal clear: Once students can decode, reading comprehension depends more on knowledge than skills. The paradox is that the more time we spend on decontextualized comprehension strategies, the less likely we are to improve literacy. Instead, effective daily architecture includes:
Begin with phonemic awareness (K–1)—5–8 minutes of oral blending, segmenting, and substituting sounds. Follow with explicit phonics/orthography lessons, including high-frequency words and cumulative review. Use connected decodable text matching taught patterns so practice builds on strengths and automaticity develops. Include fluency work through echo, choral, and paired readings, charting rate, and accuracy.
But here’s the critical piece often missed: Dedicate substantial time to language and knowledge building. This means daily read-alouds of complex texts students can’t yet decode themselves—because listening comprehension outpaces reading comprehension through at least middle school. These texts should build systematic knowledge of the world through coherent topics studied for weeks. Integrate daily writing: sentence combining, summarization, and short evidence-based responses to content that reinforce both skills and knowledge.
Embed and run MTSS well
A multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS) requires universal screening three times yearly, brief diagnostics to pinpoint subskills, weekly progress monitoring for students receiving extra help, skill-based groups regrouped every 2–3 weeks, and switching routines if growth stalls. But MTSS works best with an operating spine of relationships and collaboration.
Relationships, teaming, and family partnership (operating spine)
Pair daily SoR routines with weekly grade-level teaming (30–45 minutes) to name each student’s next literacy step and check back the following week. Discuss every student at least monthly across all their teachers to surface cross-class insights and spot struggles early. Create family touchpoints after each screening window, with plain-language explanations, and include two 10-minute at-home practices weekly. Use a strengths-first protocol turning insights into one concrete action per student daily.
The BARR model provides a practical exemplar organizing these conditions through weekly team meetings and relationship-building lessons, with documented positive effects for both all readers and struggling readers (Evidence for ESSA, 2025). After each screening window, send families a plain-language note explaining their child’s score plus two specific 10-minute activities they can use. Families are teammates in practice, not spectators.
Bottom Line
The science of reading is necessary because it matches how the brain learns to read. But reading is more than decoding—it requires a foundation of knowledge to comprehend and think. Deep, transferable learning depends on domain-specific knowledge; thinking itself is inextricably linked to the content of thought. A robust foundation of knowledge isn’t merely raw material for thought—it’s the scaffolding that makes higher-order thinking possible.
The science of reading becomes sufficient only when states set tight, funded guardrails; districts build coherent engines; and schools deliver predictable, high-quality routines every day that build both skills and knowledge systematically. We now have proof points: Louisiana’s year-over-year growth on early literacy screeners and Mississippi’s record third-grade results show that when instructional materials, dedicated time, expert coaching, and transparent data line up, students accelerate. This is not theory. It is execution with fidelity.
So let’s turn momentum into muscle:
State leaders: Set specific lists of high-quality materials for both foundational skills and knowledge building, fund expert coaching and universal screening, and publish clear, frequent data. Make the supports desirable and the results visible.
District leaders: Choose one core curricular program that builds knowledge systematically, protects instructional and intervention time, including content-rich instruction, and holds weekly coaching cycles sacred. Monitor strengths and growth, not just proficiency.
School teams: Teach the code explicitly, build knowledge daily through coherent topics and complex texts, run skill-based small groups with weekly checks, and partner with families using easily interpreted updates and 10-minute at-home routines.
Do these few hard things with vigor and discipline, and we won’t just win an argument—we will change trajectories. A second grader who can blend and encode with confidence while building knowledge about their world becomes a fifth grader who can unpack unfamiliar words with morphology and comprehend complex texts about new topics—and, soon after, a graduate who can read and interpret the fine print on a first job offer, a lease, or a ballot. That is the promise on the table.
The blueprint is clear. The wins are real. The next move is ours.
