After decades of reading wars, policy stalemates, and children quietly falling behind, teachers across the country are embracing the science of reading. That finding comes from a new Fordham report, which also tells a harder story about what’s left to do.
Something is happening in America’s elementary classrooms. After decades of reading wars, policy stalemates, and children quietly falling behind, teachers across the country are embracing the science of reading.
That finding comes from a new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. They conducted a nationally representative survey of 1,244 public school K–3 teachers and found that that the winds are shifting on reading instruction. At least 40 states have enacted science of reading laws. Professional development programs like LETRS have reached a third of the nation’s K–3 teachers. And as the Fordham survey makes clear, teachers who have gone through these types of training know more and teach better.
But the report also tells a harder story about what’s left to do. Because even as progress spreads, it isn’t reaching everyone equally. And the students most likely to be left behind are those who can least afford it.
Four important challenges remain.
Challenge 1: Teacher preparation programs are still failing new teachers
Here’s a finding that should be alarming to anyone involved in training the next generation of educators: Teachers who reported learning the most from their preservice college and university training programs scored lower on the science of reading knowledge quiz than teachers who relied on any other source of learning.
Let me say that again. The more a teacher relied on what they learned in their teacher preparation program, the less they knew about evidence-based reading instruction.
Only 2 percent of teachers said their preservice program was where they learned the most about effective reading practices. In contrast, 33 percent said they learned the most on the job, and 21 percent credited in-service professional development. For many teachers, college essentially taught them nothing useful. In some cases, that “preparation” may have actively pointed them toward discredited practices like three-cueing.
This is a fundamental bottleneck. States won’t be able to fix K–3 reading instruction at scale if their colleges of education keep sending new teachers into classrooms with an incomplete or outright misleading foundation. The Fordham report found that in states where licensure exams are aligned with the science of reading, teachers demonstrate meaningfully better knowledge.
Challenge 2: High-poverty kids are at greatest risk
Despite some signs of progress, the survey revealed a troubling gap: Teachers in high-poverty schools are, on average, less informed about and committed to reading science than their colleagues in more affluent settings.
The gap is especially pronounced around phonics. Among teachers in high-poverty settings, 43 percent failed to express a clear preference for phonics over cueing, compared to 25 percent in low-poverty schools. That means nearly half of teachers in the schools that serve the most vulnerable children are ambivalent about the single most evidence-supported element of early literacy instruction.
Children who come from under-resourced homes depend on their teachers more than children who have compensating resources at home such as books, educated parents, and other enriching experiences that build background knowledge. When the reading instruction in high-poverty schools is weaker, the children who need the most get the least.
Challenge 3: Teachers still misunderstand reading comprehension
When teachers were asked to choose between two statements about reading comprehension, 58 percent chose the wrong one. They believed that reading comprehension is “a set of generalizable skills (like finding the main idea and making inferences) that can be applied to most texts.” Only 42 percent correctly identified that reading comprehension depends primarily on “what students already know about the topic and the specific vocabulary used in a text.”
This matters enormously. Elementary reading instruction has been dominated by comprehension strategies: teaching children to summarize, make inferences, identify the main idea, visualize, and so on. These strategies feel intuitive—surely if you practice finding the main idea enough, you’ll get better at it? But the research tells a different story. These generic comprehension strategies have very little transferable effect. What actually drives comprehension is knowledge. A child who knows a lot about the American Revolution will understand a passage about Paul Revere far better than a child who was drilled in comprehension “strategies” but who knows nothing about history.
This insight is why history, science, and the arts aren’t luxuries to be cut when reading scores are low—they’re the very substance that makes reading comprehension possible. When children learn about the water cycle, medieval castles, and the civil rights movement, they’re building the cognitive raw material that will make them better readers for life.
The good news: Teachers did better when they were asked more specific questions, like the best way to build vocabulary. Seventy percent correctly identified embedding vocabulary instruction in content-rich nonfiction texts as the most effective approach. So the instinct is there. What’s needed is a deeper understanding of the full architecture of what skilled reading actually is.
Challenge 4: The culture around reading instruction is a work in progress
Perhaps the most human element of the Fordham report is what teachers say in their own words. Many are converts, enthusiastic ones:
“LETRS changed the way I teach. I am thankful to work in a district and state that is taking the science of reading seriously.”
“We’ve actually started teaching students HOW to decode and read. Before, we used the cueing system (teaching them to guess) and expected students to read novels after 15 minutes of modeling reading, and they couldn’t decode or understand what they were looking at.”
But others are ambivalent, even resistant:
“I learned from a balanced literacy era. I believe asking yourself ‘Did that make sense?’ is important while reading. I think the pendulum swings too far to one side and we need balance. I also think students need exposure to leveled or authentic text instead of constantly reading decodable texts.”
These responses are honest and human. Teachers who spent years building expertise in one approach, and who genuinely believed they were helping children, are being asked to fundamentally reimagine what good reading instruction looks like. That’s not easy. Professional identity is real, and pedagogical habits are deeply ingrained.
And yet the data are unambiguous: Teachers who understand the science of reading produce better outcomes for students. The answer to “let us teach” is: Yes, absolutely, but let’s make sure that students are learning to read.
The science of reading movement has momentum right now, but cultural change is notoriously slow. The worst outcome would be to declare victory prematurely and let that momentum dissipate before it’s had time to fully reshape how students are taught to read.
Editor’s note: This was first published on the author’s Substack, Aldeman on Education.
For much of the past three decades, education reform rested on a surprisingly durable bipartisan foundation, from the standards and accountability movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s through No Child Left Behind and into the Obama-era push for more rigorous teacher evaluations. That consensus was never without tension, but it held long enough to engender significant progress. Over time, however, it began to wear down, arguably reaching its last gasp in Washington with the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act. What followed was a mix of reform fatigue, rising polarization, and declining confidence in testing and accountability mechanisms, alongside a broader shift away from technocratic problem-solving. As that consensus frayed, so too did the assumptions that had long governed who should control what in public education.
The erosion of that confidence is visible in public opinion data. In the early 1970s, nearly two-thirds of Americans, across party lines, reported having “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in public schools. Fast forward to today, that figure has fallen to less than one-third overall, with confidence declining sharply in both parties, especially among Republicans. What has followed is not a clean ideological reversal, but something more fragmented and harder to categorize—one that is increasingly visible in debates over local control. The familiar lines that once structured education policy—between state and local authority—have blurred, and the red-blue divide on local control has begun to shift in a couple of unexpected ways.
First, the traditional red-blue roles around local control no longer map neatly onto today’s reality. Historically, red states prioritized local autonomy, framing it as a defense against state and federal overreach. That commitment has become far more selective. Several red states have taken a more prescriptive approach to schooling, from requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in classrooms to using funding incentives and state-vetted lists to steer districts toward preferred instructional materials. At the same time, many blue states now default to a posture of deference toward schools and districts, often reinforcing the influence of teachers unions.
Second, the culture war dynamics, though often criticized in education politics as a distraction, have, for better or worse, been a source of political energy, helping to galvanize parents and lawmakers in red states around issues that might otherwise struggle to gain traction, and weakening the case for local control. State takeovers offer a useful case in point. In Texas, for example, the state has asserted direct authority over Houston ISD and several other districts identified as persistently underperforming. While culture war debates have helped mobilize political engagement around race and gender conflicts, that energy has also spilled over into broader concerns about school performance and accountability. In contexts where education issues have become more visible and politically salient to parents and voters, lawmakers have stronger incentives to act decisively. In states where that level of engagement is lower, that kind of willingness to intervene is harder to generate.
Taken together, these examples suggest that the most important shift in education politics may not be a straightforward partisan realignment, but a deeper change in how trust is distributed across different levels of governance. In states like Texas and Tennessee, this reflects a broader readiness to turn public dissatisfaction into administrative action, whether through state takeovers or other efforts to shape specific practices.
In many blue states, by contrast, state action operates through more incremental and institutionally constrained channels. For example, Massachusetts leveraged regulatory actions instead of legislative wins to make reforms on educator licensure, teacher evaluations, and teacher compensation in districts under state receivership. There’s also indication that Oregon wants to do something about its dismal test results. Blue-state education reform is not absent, but it tends to look different in form and pathway. The result is a landscape in which local control remains rhetorically central but is increasingly contingent in practice.
To understand this shift, it’s worth turning to Rick Hess’s argument about the broader erosion of trust in educational institutions:
Through the late 20th century and the first years of this one, policymakers and the public mostly treated…the internal workings of schools with benign neglect. As much as educators decried the “intrusiveness” of No Child Left Behind or Obama-era teacher evaluation, neither initiative made much effort to influence school-level decisions around books, instructional materials, grading, curricula, staffing, or how to teach civics or history. Even “reformers” hesitated to insert themselves too deeply into the day-to-day work of schools... But the pandemic, populism, and the platforming of “anti-racist education” combined to upend this hands-off approach.
In our current environment, debates over issues like local control, school choice, or accountability have become less about the policies themselves and more about which actors are trusted to wield authority. The result is a negatively polarized system in which the same tools (e.g., district-level takeovers, tax credit scholarships) are embraced or rejected depending on which political coalitions favor them.
Seen through this lens, the red-blue flip on local control is best understood as a broader institutional realignment driven by declining trust, accelerated in no small part by prolonged school closures during Covid. That has important implications for the future of education reform. Efforts to rebuild agreement around the balance of authority in education will likely struggle unless they grapple directly with the question of trust—who holds it, who has lost it, and how it can be regained. Until then, debates over education policy will continue to be shaped less by shared goals than by competing judgments about which parts of the system deserve the public’s confidence.
Last week, I participated in a meeting with other policy wonks, debating (among other topics) whether all states should follow the lead of the Southern Surge rs and embrace a top-down approach to curriculum reform. We’ve tackled kindred questions before, but the discussion remains front of mind, in part because of the Fordham Institute’s new study on the implementation of the science of reading. Robert Pondiscio does a nice job of summarizing its findings, which come from a national survey of K–3 teachers:
In many ways, the survey shows significant movement in the right direction: Most teachers now favor phonics over cueing. Many report having received recent training aligned to the science of reading. Widely respected programs like UFLI and CKLA are gaining traction. Teachers themselves often describe recent shifts toward phonics and explicit instruction as overdue and beneficial. This is no small thing. Frankly, it would have been unimaginable just a few short years ago. (Thanks, Emily Hanford!)
But the report also finds that only half of teachers describe their approach as fully structured and explicit. One in three still report using a “balanced” approach that includes discredited and deleterious methods such as leveled texts and “cueing.” And nearly one in five say they take an “eclectic” or “immersive” approach not necessarily including phonics.
Robert connects the Fordham report to the “Mississippi Marathon,” the topic of a recent AEI webinar he hosted:
One detail from the webinar has stayed with me: Mississippi officials would regularly review lists of which districts were sending teachers to literacy training, and if a district wasn’t participating, they picked up the phone and called the superintendent. That may sound mundane, but it’s not. It’s what seriousness and accountability looks like in practice: Someone notices an issue and follows up. Behavior changes and outcomes follow. Contrast this with the way that too often we think about reform: pass a bill, announce an initiative and funding, hold a press conference, and assume the field will absorb it (or worse, assume the capacity already exists to execute), as if a school is a smartphone receiving a software update.
This, it seems to me, is the heart of the matter. If states actually expect to change classroom practice and boost student learning, they need to exert much more control over curriculum and instruction.
That’s hardly news to some analysts, especially on the center-left, people such as Morgan Polikoff, who has been beating the drum for years about the ways that local control impedes instructional reform and improved student achievement. Back in 2020, Morgan wrote:
Policymakers should not throw out the goal of improving teaching at scale. Therefore, they would be wise to retain the standards and assessments that are now in place. But if these leaders are serious about that goal, they will probably have to be much more aggressive.
What kinds of policies do I have in mind? First, these leaders could take curriculum more seriously than they have in the past. States could require the public schools to choose from among just a small number of curricular options. Teacher-education programs could train teachers in using those specific curricula, and the state could follow up by giving them ongoing training on those curricula. Teachers could be strongly discouraged, or even prevented, from cobbling together curricula from random, unregulated websites like Pinterest (or at the very least, states and districts could curate these kinds of materials)… The Wild West days of every teacher and every school with their own curricula must come to an end.
Morgan still thinks states should be “much more aggressive.” California, for example, should learn from the new Fordham report and make districts choose from a small list of vetted curriculum and professional development providers if it wants to implement the science of reading effectively, he now argues.
Or consider Andy Rotherham’s take on the Fordham study (making the Mississippi vs. California contrast explicit):
Today, lots of states are doing “science of reading” but they may not be doing science of reading. It’s more than phonics. It can’t be challenge by choice for schools or teachers. It requires a comprehensive set of supports and a commitment to knowledge-rich curriculum and teaching. What Mississippi did and what California now says it’s doing in the name of science of reading are not the same thing.
But not everyone is convinced that state “leadership” (a.k.a. micromanagement) on curriculum is smart. Terry Ryan makes the OG reform argument for “tight-loose” instead, using the Cold War terminology of “trust but verify.” In the context of Idaho’s efforts to improve instruction in U.S. history and civics, he writes:
In 2015, the state required students to pass a civics exam to graduate from high school. Over time, this assessment has become more rigorous, evolving beyond a basic naturalization test to include key constitutional principles and foundational documents.
This is a model worth building on: The state sets clear expectations and measures outcomes, but leaves the methods to educators. If we believe in limited government, local control, and accountability, we should apply those same principles to civics and history education policy.
The role of the state is not to dictate every lesson taught in every classroom. It is to set high standards, ensure transparency, and hold schools accountable for results. When schools meet those expectations, they should be trusted with the freedom to do their work….
Mandating curriculum from Boise—however well-intentioned—moves us in the opposite direction, toward centralized control and away from the local innovation that has long defined Idaho education.
We can achieve strong civics education without sacrificing local control. We can promote patriotism without prescribing pedagogy. And we can hold schools accountable without tying their hands.
Terry is speaking for a lot of reformers when pushing back against “mandates,” “centralized control,” and “tying [schools’] hands.”
Partly this is ideological, but it’s also based on a common-sense, real-world concern: What if states get it wrong?
What if, in their zeal to improve teaching and learning, they prescribe curricula and teaching methods that don’t work? After all, until very recently, the field was all gaga over “balanced literacy.” Had states taken an “aggressive” approach a few decades ago, some might have pushed bad practices onto unsuspecting schools and districts.
Nor is this concern entirely in the past. Karen Vaites, for one, has been sounding the alarm about states’ list of approved reading programs, which unfortunately include some bad ones while leaving out some of the best. Reviewing Fordham’s new report, she notes that UFLI is lauded as an effective, popular program—but one that has “faced many challenges getting onto state lists.” In addition: “Benchmark Advance, which is called out by Fordham for its ‘unscientific methods,’ is on numerous state lists, including Colorado, Virginia, and Ohio.”
It reminds me of Emily Hanford’s podcast episode on Steubenville, Ohio, which has gotten great results for decades with Success for All—only to see SFA excluded from the Buckeye State’s list of approved programs. (Ohio’s excellent state supe, Steve Dackin, quickly fixed the oversight.)
So that’s the rub. If states are going to push, prod, or outright command districts to adopt certain curricula, hire certain vendors, and adopt certain approaches, they’d better be right. And though we know a lot about “the science of reading,” we know a lot less than we might want to admit about which particular programs and people are good at getting those practices adopted effectively in real-world classrooms. And if that’s true for early literacy, it’s doubly so for math, civics, and everything else.
And that’s the debate. Should all states follow the lead of Louisiana, Tennessee, and Mississippi and exert greater control over teaching and learning? Or stick with their traditional role of setting standards, assessing student learning, and (let’s hope) holding schools and districts accountable, leaving the rest to local control?
Editor's note: This was first published on Mike's Substack, SCHOOLED.
Wide-ranging education reforms in New York City Public Schools in the early 2000s under then-mayor Michael Bloomberg and schools chief Joel Klein ran the gamut from school closures and consolidations to revamping academic offerings and giving families additional choices within the district. The overarching goal was to boost long-languishing student achievement. A new working paper examines which reforms worked and extracts some vital lessons that other districts might heed.
A trio of economists divide the various reform efforts into categories derived from economics and computer science terms—“reallocations” and “resource augmentations”—that are precise but not necessarily intuitive. Reallocation reforms include changes to New York’s school assignment algorithms and increased information distributed to families regarding school options, intending to make it easier for students to find the best academic “fit.” Resource augmentation reforms include the creation of 200 small high schools in the city and the simultaneous closure of larger, more traditional schools that were underperforming. The clearest way to differentiate the interventions is that reallocation keeps most or all schools open but allows students to move around more freely, while resource augmentation closes schools to effectively eliminate bad choices and create better options. Students still move, but it is a less voluntary proposition and all remaining schools are, theoretically, better options.
The researchers’ first step is to see how the real-world reforms impacted students. Data come from the NYC DOE administrative information system and cover students enrolled from the 2003–04 through the 2012–13 school years. Specifically, they focus on four cohorts enrolled in eighth grade between 2003–04 and 2006–07. They follow each cohort through high school and examine middle school test scores, high school enrollment, New York Regents test scores, high school graduation, and college attendance within two years of their expected high school graduation date.
School quality is measured in two ways: (1) an ordinary least squares value-added model, and (2) an estimate of student preferences for specific schools based on ranked lists submitted as part of their high school applications. The first approach controls for observable student characteristics; the second accounts for unobserved factors that influence student choice such as school culture and ease of transportation. The researchers also create what they call counterfactual impact estimates, which simulate student outcomes under various idealized reform scenarios.
The report is wonky, but the bottom line is that the most ideal student–school matches achieved by reallocation generated only modest educational gains. For example, in a model designed to represent perfect choice—with each hypothetical child assigned to the ideal school for their needs—the impact of reallocation reform was just a 3.8 percentage point increase in both high school graduation and college attendance. That’s not much—and it’s also hypothetical. In the real world, such ideal student–school matches rarely occurred in the NYC data, largely because available seats at the most effective (and desired) schools are limited. In other words, making it easier in theory to access a coveted high school yields benefits for those who get in, but the reality is that very few additional students actually achieve such access.
By contrast, resource augmentation policies appear to provide as much or more positive impact for students with less systemic disruption. The terminology used makes these findings feel counterintuitive—how can closing a number of schools, opening a bunch of new ones, and making kids move be less disruptive?—but the concept makes more sense when the explanation is simplified. Closing lower-performing schools and making sure that impacted students move to higher-performing ones is a boon for student achievement. Whatever systemic disruptions do occur are more than offset by widespread student academic gains. In New York, closing 14 percent of the city’s underperforming high schools led to gains predicted to be comparable to the most idealized version of the perfect reallocation model.
Of course, getting kids into “replacement” schools that are better than the ones being closed is not an exact science. The researchers use a sophisticated value-added calculation in their impacts modeling, but also run similar analyses that suggest a simple look at graduation rates is nearly as effective in determining school quality. Whether graduation rates are an effective measure of student learning remains a question for another time (color all of Fordham skeptical on that score). Regardless of what criteria are agreed upon to determine school quality, there will axiomatically be a set of schools at the bottom of every ranking. By starting with the worst schools on the list when closures become the preferred reform, you come as close as possible to guaranteeing that impacted students will find a better option.
In the end, all this complexity boils down to a few simple, albeit highly generalized, points. One is that systemic reforms in school districts should be aimed at giving more students better access to the best possible schools, but shuffling students around is limited by the effectiveness of the lowest-performing options and by capacity restraints in better schools. Another is that if you don’t have enough space in existing high-performing schools, the easiest fix is to start closing the worst of the worst and investing in better ones.
SOURCE: Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag A. Pathak, and Christopher R. Walters, “Who Gets What in Education: Can School Matching Improve Student Achievement?” NBER Working Paper (March 2026).
Once you learn to drive a car, you’re better equipped to drive a truck. Knowing how to drive a car might also help you to develop better decision-making skills. That’s because of a phenomenon called “learning transfer”: the application of skills and concepts learned in one context to another. If the disciplines are closely related, like driving a car versus a truck, that’s a “near” transfer, but if the applications are more distant, like driving and decision-making, that’s a “far” transfer.
Learning transfer happens across subjects in school, too. A 2022 working paper, as summarized by my colleague Dr. Amber Northern, examined the Model of Reading Engagement (MORE), a multi-year literacy intervention that integrates reading instruction with science and social studies content. The study found both near transfer effects on reading and far transfer effects on math. Now, a follow-up study from two Harvard researchers builds on these findings by investigating the mechanisms by which MORE leads to improved performance in a distant academic domain like math. Specifically, it tests the extent to which third grade reading skills explain the observed effects on fourth grade math achievement.
The analytic sample consists of 2,073 students across 30 schools participating in a MORE randomized controlled trial, followed from first to fourth grade (2018–22). The intervention was implemented in treatment schools from the spring of first grade through the spring of second grade, while control schools received business-as-usual instruction. In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, MORE materials were provided to both groups in third grade, resulting in different levels of overall exposure. Therefore, treatment students experienced a three-year “full spiral” of MORE (first through third grade), while control students received a one-year “partial spiral” (third grade only).
Using test scores from the end of third and fourth grade to assess immediate and long-term outcomes, respectively, the researchers examined whether students who made greater gains in reading were also the ones who later performed better in math. The research team combined multiple measures—including standardized test scores, vocabulary, and comprehension—to capture overall reading ability and compared these to later math performance on end-of-grade tests. They also tested other possible explanations for math gains, examining whether factors related to but distinct from reading skills, such as increased reading engagement or improvements in social-emotional skills, played a role.
Consistent with earlier findings, the MORE intervention had positive effects on both reading (near transfer) and math (far transfer): a 1 standard deviation increase in third grade reading ability corresponds with a roughly 0.56 standard deviation increase in grade four math. About half the math gains attributed to the MORE intervention are associated with stronger reading skills.
Not all reading skills contributed equally. General reading ability and vocabulary showed stronger relationships with math gains, while more narrow skills—such as content-specific comprehension and background knowledge—played a smaller role. Reading engagement and social-emotional skills in third grade did not lead to measurable gains for grade four math outcomes.
Overall, the study highlights the potential power of far transfer, showing that learning gains can ripple across disciplines. It also suggests that the full impact of an intervention cannot be captured by examining only the outcomes it directly targets, though this finding should be interpreted cautiously. A large body of cognitive science, including work by Daniel Willingham, suggests skills are often domain-specific and may not be transferred across disciplines such as reading and math.
At the same time, the findings raise important questions. If reading explains only half of the improvement in math, what accounts for the rest? While far transfer occurs between math and reading, are there other domains where learning transfer is less effective? Further, detailed evidence on the relative contributions of different components of reading instruction would help inform more targeted interventions.
Because the researchers focus only on elementary students, it would also be valuable to examine learning transfer among middle and high schoolers. Future research could explore transfer not only across disciplines, but also across instructional contexts and teachers.
Finally, because control students received one year of the intervention, the contrast between treatment and control groups is less clear than in a typical randomized design, and as a result, the study may underestimate the full impact of sustained exposure to MORE. Still, these results offer strong empirical evidence for transfer effects in education.
SOURCE: Joshua B. Gilbert and James S. Kim, “Mapping the Mechanisms of Interdisciplinary Learning Transfer from Reading to Math Achievement: Evidence from a Large-Scale Randomized Controlled Trial,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (January 2026).
Christy Wolfe, director of K–12 policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, joins the Education Gadfly Show to discuss a new report on the American workforce—and what it means for K–12 education. As policymakers call for a clearer national talent strategy, which ideas echo past reforms, what’s genuinely new, and should school improvement efforts shift from individual schools to districts?
Then, on the Research Minute, Amber Northern looks at what happens when schools lock up student phones—and the results may surprise you.
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