I’m going to give you a reading test. Ready? Say these words out loud:
Chip
Hill
Jars
Bep
Fod
Glork
If you’re an adult seeing this, with years and years of reading experience, your brain probably processed the list pretty quickly. You could even pronounce the last few entries, even though they aren’t real words.
Beginning readers need to be taught how to do this. Reading doesn’t come naturally, and kids need to be explicitly taught how letters correspond to sounds. If kids don’t master this foundational decoding skill, they will likely struggle to read more challenging texts.
Clearly, decoding is an important and fundamental reading skill. So why don’t we test for it in the United States? England does. Starting in 2012, the Brits started giving a phonics check to all six-year-olds. At the end of their first year of school (equivalent to kindergarten), kids are given a list of forty words to read out loud. Half of them are real words, like “chip,” and half are nonsense words, like “bep.” Teachers listen to each student read the words and then score them on how many they decode correctly. Children have to get at least 80 percent correct to pass.
Not that much happens with the results. For example, England doesn’t require that kids who fail the phonics check have to repeat a grade. But parents get to see their child’s result, and kids who fail the test have to retake it the next year. The results are also shared with officials who use them to evaluate each school’s performance.
In this light, England’s phonics check is a light-touch intervention with relatively low stakes. But it has driven dramatic increases in student performance. The percentage of kids passing the phonics check on their first try soared from 58 percent in 2012 to 82 percent in 2019. (The check was paused in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic, and the pass rate fell to 75 percent in 2022, but it was back up to 80 percent this year.)
Moreover, England’s scores on international assessments have also risen. On the PIRLS test of fourth grade reading, England’s scores rose 6 points from 2011 to 2021, a time when most countries were seeing declines. Scores in France, Finland, and Germany, for example, fell 6, 19, and 17 points, respectively. More recently, England’s fourth grade math scores rose 11 points from 2011 to 2023, while performance in the U.S. was falling 24 points. The phonics check isn’t responsible for all these gains—England has also emphasized a knowledge-rich curriculum and tests specifically aligned to that content—but it is a fundamental building block.
Could the U.S. benefit from an England-style phonics check? Sure, we already have plenty of reading tests, some of which give educators a good sense of a student’s early literacy skills. But there are key differences in how American students are assessed, and we could learn some lessons from the Brits.
First is the question of timing and focus. America’s federally mandated English Language Arts tests don’t start until third grade and gauge a host of reading skills that are interwoven with the students’ background knowledge. The national NAEP reading assessment, first delivered in fourth grade, suffers from the same issue. In contrast, England’s phonics check is specifically concerned with one key reading skill—decoding—and measures it at age six. That’s earlier and more focused than what we’re doing here in the States.
Second, England makes clear that all students are expected to master decoding, and it communicates to parents whether their child has done so. In the U.S., that benchmark is far from universal, and parents are not always informed. According to ExcelinEd, sixteen states have adopted “universal screener” tests that identify students in grades K–2 who are at risk of having difficulty reading. Nine of those states also require parents to be notified when their child has been flagged with a reading deficiency. But that means forty-one states and the District of Columbia are leaving that up to chance and hoping schools are teaching kids to decode.
Any school or district could decide to adopt its own version of a phonics check. It’s a simple protocol, and because the stakes are low, there’s not much to worry about with respect to test security.
But state and national policymakers could think even bigger. If a state were to adopt a phonics check and report the results, it would send a strong signal to teachers and school leaders about the importance of making sure all students are taught to decode. At the national level, congressional leaders could consider requiring every state to deliver a phonics check. Or, at the very least, they could include something similar on NAEP.
Simply put, America’s third grade reading tests are administered too late to spot and rectify emerging problems. Too many school systems simply pass kids along in the hopes that they will naturally pick up reading skills over time, rather than catching and fixing gaps early. An early phonics check would make sure that all kids are learning to decode letters into sounds.
Editor’s note: This was first published by The 74.
