The Delta Issue #102

Kids Don’t Stop Learning to Read in Third Grade

Hi all, Kunjan here.

Last fall, Rebecca Kockler and I wrote about one of the most persistent—and harmful—myths in education: that children learn to read through third grade and then begin reading to learn. (Check out that piece in The 74 here.)

Treating literacy like a switch that flips after third grade has real and harmful consequences: Schools often stop explicitly teaching students how to decode words long before the words themselves stop becoming more complex.

Rebecca and I continued that conversation in a live webinar this week, exploring how reading development evolves as children get older—and what state leaders can do to better support students through the middle grades and beyond.

If you missed the webinar or want to share it with a colleague, the recording is available here. We covered a lot, including some excellent audience questions.

For this week’s Delta, I wanted to share three ideas sticking with me after we wrapped the conversation. 

Literacy instruction must remain explicit and deliberate in upper grades.

When Rebecca and her colleagues at Reading Reimagined, an Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF) program, began studying adolescent literacy five years ago, she expected their work to focus primarily on vocabulary and background knowledge.

Then they came across research that stopped them in their tracks: the “decoding threshold,” or the baseline level of reading fluency students need before they have a real chance of comprehending what they read. 

We’re explicit and deliberate in the early years, teaching young students how to decode a simple word like “cat.” But as students encounter longer, more complex words, they need the same kind of explicit instruction. The letters in “cat,” for example, make a different sound in words like “education” and “vacation.” Teaching an older student to decode “vacation” should be just as deliberate as teaching a younger student to decode “cat.”

That means continuing to teach morphology, multisyllabic decoding, academic vocabulary and fluency as words and texts become more sophisticated. Yet most state standards provide little guidance on teaching these advanced foundational skills. As a result, a student can arrive in seventh grade struggling to decode grade-level text—not because they forgot how to read, but because the complexity of the words outpaced the instruction they received.

Rebecca estimates that, at a minimum, 25% of middle schoolers fall below the decoding threshold. And in some districts that number is more than 50% of students who are locked out of reading comprehension altogether. 

Learning to read and reading to learn are not two separate stages. Students need to read to learn from their earliest years—and they need to keep learning to read as text becomes more sophisticated.

Sometimes the fastest way to speed up is to slow down.

This may sound counterintuitive given the urgency of the adolescent literacy challenge. I’ve heard from leaders in the field—and from legislators—who are eager to move quickly toward new requirements for older students. And I understand that instinct. But we are in a different place with adolescent literacy than we were when states began overhauling early literacy policy.

When it comes to adolescent literacy, we still have more to learn. Assessments, curricula, interventions and professional learning designed specifically for older readers are still emerging. Few options have been validated at scale. And we haven’t fully studied what it takes to implement promising approaches in real schools and classrooms.

Going slow doesn’t mean states should do nothing. It means they should pilot before they scale.

States can partner with a small group of willing districts to test combinations of:

• Assessments designed to identify advanced decoding challenges;
• Targeted supports that connect skill-building to meaningful, grade-level text; and
• Professional learning that helps educators provide explicit literacy instruction in ELA and across subjects.

The goal should be not only to learn whether an approach works, but to understand what it takes to make it work: What must teachers do differently? What support do principals need? What will it take to move a promising pilot through the full implementation chain?

Before asking every teacher and school leader to change their practice, states should be very clear about what they are asking them to do.

States Don’t Need to Start from Scratch

Several states are beginning to experiment.

Maryland has released a draft statewide policy that extends literacy expectations into grades 4–12, with an emphasis on advanced foundational skills in core instruction and adolescent literacy screeners in the upper grades.

Minnesota is currently the only state using a validated adolescent literacy screener—Capti ReadBasix—statewide in the upper grades.

These efforts will give the entire field opportunities to learn. The goal should not be to replicate them immediately, but to study how they work, what implementation demands and what results they produce.

We’re excited to keep learning alongside state leaders, researchers and educators—and to work together toward a literacy system that helps every child become a confident, successful reader.

Let’s Get Muddy

• Watch the webinar replay.
• Explore the slides from our presentation. 
• Check out ROAR: A free assessment from Stanford University’s Reading and Dyslexia Research Program that measures foundational reading skills and can be used by teachers and families.
• Read the research on the decoding threshold from ETS Research Institute .
• And if you want more information on literacy standards for grades 3-8, Reading Reimagined has a resource for that.
• And finally, one curriculum that Rebecca’s team has researched and endorses is Sounds Right, a program created by the British Council which uses a powerful structured linguistic phonics approach.