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.
These are halcyon days for the science of reading. Depending on what you include, up to 40 states have implemented some form of science of reading legislation. Emily Hansford’s 2022 podcast “Sold a Story,” which highlighted the harm done by whole language instruction, is quite probably the most impactful intervention in education since the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001. The progress made in reading skills by children in Mississippi, based on implementing the science of reading, is only the second state intervention in the last half century to garner the title of a “miracle.”
Of course, there are cautions: While Mississippi’s fourth graders continue to show outsized progress, their eighth grade results have declined since 2019. The most generous description is that the state’s results were flat between 2022 to 2024. As for the nation, despite the plethora of legislation promoting the Science of Reading, 2024reading results for fourth graders were the worst in 25 years. Apparently, most states can’t (yet?) reproduce the multiple policies and careful implementation that took place in Mississippi (and in Atlanta, the only jurisdiction measured by NAEP that showed progress from the assessment two years earlier).
Hard work lies ahead. I watched as Carey Wright, then state superintendent in Mississippi, laid out (on multiple tables) her 112-point plan to boost reading achievement in the state. Strong legislation (the Literacy Based Promotion Act of 2013) proved a key launch pad; it enabled the state to hold back third-grade students who weren’t at grade level, mandate reading screenings, require professional development for teachers, and field literacy coaches. Each of these elements, however, required granular implementation. For example, specific literacy coach training programs were established, featuring a detailed curriculum that included on-site visits and virtual classrooms.
The first lesson for the nation’s effort to teach students to read is not simply to “pass a law,” but also to get the details right at the district level. “Detailed implementation” may not be a glamorous message, but it is the mission-critical path to success.
The second lesson is that, while the science of reading constitutes the right approach to learning to read, older students need a different focus when it comes to reading to learn.
The clue to long-term reading fluency lies in one often-overlooked strand of the Scarborough Reading Rope (a visual that summarizes the science of reading): background knowledge. As E.D. Hirsch has argued for decades, the capacity to comprehend a piece of reading depends on knowing enough about the topic to make sense of any new, unknown elements. This partially explains why American 15-year-olds perform relatively better on the international PISA reading exam (where our students improved in 2022 compared to 2015, and were ranked 7th when grouped with the Chinese jurisdictions) out of 80 countries. The PISA exams provide all the required information in the questions, which primarily consist of non-fiction content based on graphics, tables, and journal articles, and ask students to use the given information to deduce the answer. The test, in other words, minimizes the need for external knowledge, and the text excerpts are short. By contrast, many of the NAEP examples require not just a greater attention span but considerably more external knowledge.
Take, for example, this excerpt from an eighth grade test: “Encompassing some 10 million square miles, the gyre is home to trade winds and circular currents that tend to keep whatever meanders into it without self- propulsion for months, years, even decades at a time.” I had to look “gyre” up (I thought it just meant “gyrate”).
Since American tests use texts students are unlikely to have read, background knowledge is everything. Unlocking the science of reading means, per Scarborough’s rope, that we stop treating science, social studies, and the arts as second- or third-class subjects. Reading, from the beginning, must be about building an ever-expanding and deepening grasp of information about the human condition (through fiction) and its cultures, together with geography, history, biology, and astronomy (among other topics).
A third and somewhat counterintuitive lesson is to reconsider the ELA Common Core Standards’ mandate to treat readers as detectives, as David Coleman, the chief architect of the standards, has maintained. Even if it sometimes makes sense to treat young readers this way, it undermines literature for the majority of older students. Great texts—especially fiction—are not a crime scene to be solved. What is required is not “finding the main idea,” but, rather, wonder and thoughtfulness.
Take this excerpt from the end of the Great Gatsby:
And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning. . . .
What’s the main idea? Wrong question. How many of our 15-year-olds, having read the book, could think first, then discuss this passage, with its complex imagery, poetic cadences, and erotic echoes? Reading invites students into new worlds: while enlarging their knowledge, it breaks down the barriers of time, space, and familiarity. Learning to read may be a science, but reading to learn belongs to the humanities. It is time we treated it that way, lest the adventure of reading go the way of the dodo bird.
