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.
The United States faces a literacy crisis. Last month, the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that one in three 12th graders scored “below basic” in reading. After thirteen years, more than 2,000 school days, and nearly $200,000 invested in the average student’s K–12 schooling, more than a million high school seniors are illiterate.
The nation’s failure to ensure that a generation of children master the foundational skill of reading has many causes. But a significant reason has been that too many schools, teacher colleges, and teachers ignored one of the most widely accepted findings in education research.
In 2000, the Congressionally-mandated National Reading Panel released a report analyzing the findings of roughly 100,000 studies on how children learn to read. The panel identified five pillars of reading—phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension—and provided a foundation for what has become known as the “science of reading.”
But over the past quarter-century, many teachers embraced alternative approaches to reading instruction, such as balanced literacy and methods that encouraged students to essentially guess a word’s meaning based on context, rather than decoding the words by sounding out the letters. Balanced literacy became the dominant method for teaching reading instruction in elementary schools after 2000. According to a 2019 Education Week survey, 72 percent of elementary school teachers were using balanced literacy at the time.
Following the release of Emily Hanford’s popular Sold a Story podcast in 2022, more than two dozen states have enacted science of reading laws requiring evidence-based best practices in the classroom. There is now encouraging evidence that ongoing return to evidence-based practices has the potential to reverse the nation’s literacy crisis. Mississippi, which enacted a science of reading law a decade ago, saw sharp gains in NAEP reading scores. In 2024, Mississippi students’ reading scores, once among the lowest in the nation, have now surpassed the national average.
The national policy shift to embrace the science of reading is worth celebrating. But the hard work to ensure that all American children learn to read will fall to students, teachers, and parents across the country. These evidence-based teaching methods require direct and explicit instruction, both in whole-class settings and in small groups or individual sessions with children. Through ongoing progress monitoring and support, teachers use data to identify gaps, adjust instruction, and help every student build toward full reading mastery, including skills related to both decoding words and language comprehension.
This hard work requires expertise, resources, and time to be implemented effectively. For example, Mississippi’s successful application of the science of reading involved a statewide partnership between federally funded education researchers and public school districts to provide training and coaching assistance to help classroom teachers successfully implement evidence-based best practices.
Now, a team of researchers and technologists is partnering to make the science of reading easier to implement in the classroom.
The University of Florida Literacy Institute (UFLI) has developed a comprehensive, step-by-step phonics program called UFLI Foundations for teachers to deliver high-quality instruction in phonics that is aligned to the science of reading. UFLI reports providing intensive professional development to dozens of school districts across the United States, and the institute has launched collaborations with eight other state governments. Beyond its formal professional development partnerships with districts, the program has spread rapidly through word of mouth amongst teachers since the release of the UFLI Foundations teacher manual in 2022 and is used now by hundreds of thousands of teachers around the world.
Federally-funded researchers at WestEd conducted a pilot project to evaluate the use of UFLI’s Foundations program in 21 elementary schools in north central Florida, focusing on students’ performance. The 2023 evaluation concluded that “students receiving UFLI foundations performed much higher than control students,” and all students, including those with disabilities, benefited.
As the Florida literacy researchers work to expand their program across the country, Dr. Holly Lane describes “progress monitoring and small group support” as the most common challenge for effective implementation of their evidence-based program. In other words, teachers must continuously monitor individual students’ progress, identify the appropriate next instructional step on the journey to literacy, and assign students to the proper small group to stay on track. This work can involve scoring weekly tests, analyzing individual students’ progress, and comparing these results with guides to update small group assignments continuously.
This is where technology comes in. “You-Fly,” as it’s known in Gainesville, has partnered with Project Read AI, a startup that offers a structured literacy platform powered by artificial intelligence and used by over 150,000 teachers. Together, they created a technology portal to help teachers implement progress monitoring as designed within the UFLI Foundations program. Teachers scan in students’ weekly spelling tests with the help of AI, and the program automatically analyzes students’ progress and uses an algorithm to group students for further support based on their error patterns for a given skill. The technology portal provides teachers with a dashboard to monitor students’ progress, assign small groups, and identify daily lesson plans for each small group for the next week, saving them an hour of time each week. The current cost of using the technology is $3.50 annually per student, a fraction of most educational technology solutions.
Teachers using the technology provide strong testimonials about how it is making their teaching more effective. Jessica, a second-grade teacher from Hobbs, New Mexico, explained that the tool is making it easier to monitor students’ progress and assign accurate lessons. “I love that I can see my kids [data and follow up lesson plans] on one page.” She added that she values how the technology clearly outlines instructions for each day of the week. Another teacher, Jacqueline, described the tool as “the answer to my prayers” and said she looks forward to Friday when she can see how her students are progressing.
The Department of Education is currently in the process of redesigning the Institute of Education Sciences, which oversees hundreds of millions in federal education research expenditures. Meanwhile, the White House is working to implement its AI education executive order. A pillar of that order is to “improve education through artificial intelligence.”
For both the department and the White House, the partnership between researchers and technologies using AI to improve literacy instruction and advance the science of reading could be a national model for helping children and reversing our national literacy crisis.
