The Science of Reading for Educators

  Introduction You may have missed the news in North Carolina, but Senate Bill 387 , also known as the Excellent Public Schools Act of 2021, was recently passed on April 9, 2021. There has been a great deal of debate and misunderstanding from various groups around the state regarding the passage of this bill. For the past two years, the North Carolina State Board of Education has taken up the issue of early literacy and teacher preparation programs in regards to literacy. The Prek-12 Literacy Instruction and Teacher Preparation Task Force, composed of educators and stakeholders around the state, examined current teacher preparation programs and the state of literacy in North Carolina, and the task force made recommendations to the NC State Board of Education based on their findings. You can read about the specifics in my previous blog posts What’s Happening in North Carolina Literacy and What is Read to Achieve . The current bill aims to align literacy instructional practices in the

In education, there has been a heavy emphasis on examining early literacy instructional practices supported by a great deal of funding from the government. Setting a solid literacy foundation for students by third grade is crucial to later success. Currently, struggling older readers read on approximately a 2.5 to 5.0 reading level (Archer, Gleason, & Vachon 2003). While efforts to improve early literacy efforts are worthy, what are we doing to help our students who still continue to struggle with reading beyond the second grade? For anyone who has worked with students in grades 3 all the way up to high school, you know how heartbreaking it is to work with students who are reading significantly below grade level. Frequently, these are students who have repeated grades and are still struggling significantly. Beyond third grade, remediation for struggling readers becomes much more complex as students struggle with multiple areas of literacy: decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and compreh