Sound it out

Sunshine cuts across a long table cluttered with papers at Madison’s Sequoya Public Library as Janice Schreiber-Poznik points to letters, making sounds as she explains how we learn to read.

“Every person that learns how to read has to have this awareness of sounds,” Schreiber-Poznik says. “Let’s say we say ‘cat,’ we just say ‘cat’ and it’s all co-articulated. In order to learn how to read you have to be able to stretch all those sounds apart … and then blend it back together again.”

She sounds it out. “C” — a hard c. “A” — a soft a. “T” — a t sound to round out the word. “C, A, T,” she says again, still sounding it out but faster. The third time she says, “cat,” just like any confident reader would.

Schreiber-Poznik is a reading and dyslexia specialist who founded a private tutoring business in 1991. While the Madison school district’s curriculum may have evolved over the years, Schreiber-Poznik hasn’t noticed a change — for better or worse — in how Madison’s students fare when it comes to reading.

“Whatever has changed or might be different, we haven’t seen it in the statistics,” she says.

The data prove her point.

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress — the largest, continuing national assessment of how students are doing in various subjects — Wisconsin’s reading ranking has seen a steady decline. In 1994, the state ranked third in average fourth grade reading scores. In 2017, Wisconsin ranked 34th.

The state’s 2017-2018 Forward Exam showed just 36.6 percent of Madison’s students were proficient in reading. Statewide, 42.4 percent of students were proficient.

The Madison school district uses a different system, called MAP, to assess reading skills. It shows students doing slightly better, with 44 percent of the district’s third graders in 2017-2018 proficient or advanced in reading. But only 18 percent of Madison’s third grade African American students were proficient or advanced in reading, compared to 67 percent of their white peers.

Critics of the way the district and state teach reading point to the fact that Wisconsin is one of the last holdouts using a balanced literacy approach. It’s a philosophy that focuses more on comprehension and the meaning of text from an early age, versus an explicit and sole focus on foundational skill-building like phonics and how letters sound and relate.

Mark Seidenberg, a UW-Madison professor and cognitive neuroscientist, has spent decades researching the way humans acquire language. He is blunt about Wisconsin’s schools’ ability to teach children to read: “If you want your kid to learn to read you can’t assume that the school’s going to take care of it. You have to take care of it outside of the school, if there’s someone in the home who can do it or if you have enough money to pay for a tutor or learning center.”

Theresa Morateck, literacy coordinator for the district, says the word “balanced” is one that’s been wrestled with for many years in the reading world.

“I think my perspective and the perspective of Madison currently is that balanced means that you’re providing time to explicitly teach those foundational skills, but also that’s not the end-all be-all of your program,” Morateck says.

According to the district, students in elementary school get 120 minutes of daily literacy instruction.

Lisa Kvistad, the district’s assistant superintendent for teaching and learning, lays out what those two hours look like for kindergarten, first and second grade. For 30 minutes, students focus on foundational skills including print awareness (the difference between letters, words and punctuation), phonemic awareness (the ability to hear, identify and make individual sounds), and phonics (correlating sounds with letters or groups of letters).

Then teachers move into a 15-minute group lesson on a topic the class is focusing on. That’s followed by a workshop in which students are broken up into different groups for 20 to 40 minutes.

In these workshops, says Kvistad, “students are in varying groups and approaching literacy acquisition through opportunities to work with the teacher, read independently, and engage in word study.”

That independent learning allows students to choose books at their assessed skill level, Kvistad says. The district also offers a supplemental online program called Lexia for students who want to work on phonics.

At the end of the workshop, teachers bring students together again to connect their independent or small group study with the mini-lesson they started with.

After reading, 30 to 50 minutes are dedicated to writing, which is also done in a workshop model. The 120 minutes are rounded out by about 20 minutes of “speaking, listening and handwriting.”

For third, fourth and fifth graders, the 120-minute block looks similar, except no time is spent on foundational skills — except for the continued ability to use Lexia.

Kvistad explains that getting the right balance of foundational skills and exposure to grade-level curriculum is an art.

“There’s always a temptation to do more phonics,” Kvistad says. But she says there are drawbacks to that: “Those little ones never get a chance to access grade level curriculum, to engage in rich dialogue with the students in class, to have experience with grade-level vocabulary.”

But for those who advocate for a purely science-based approach to teaching reading, children need to master foundational reading skills before they have any hope of progressing to the more advanced skills that are emphasized with balanced literacy.

Steven Dykstra of the Wisconsin Reading Coalition, an organization that advocates for science-based reading instruction, pulls no punches, calling balanced literacy the “current name for the bad way to teach reading.” He says it evolved from “whole language,” a now-discredited type of instruction.

“In whole language you would have taught no phonics, and when you read books with kids you would have taught them to guess and use pictures,” Dykstra says. “In balanced literacy you teach some phonics, but when you sit and read a book you still give priority to guessing and pictures as a way to identify words. And you resort to phonics as a last resort.”

The UW’s Seidenberg explores the complex science of reading in his book Language at the Speed of Sight.

“What happens when you become a skilled reader is that your knowledge of print and your knowledge of spoken language become deeply integrated in behavior and in the brain,” he tells Isthmus. “So that when you are successful at becoming a reader you have this close, intimate relationship between print and sound.”

Phonics and phonemic awareness are just two components of a larger developmental sequence, he says. But there’s a period of learning to read when kids need that specific instruction, and if it’s ignored, or not focused on in the early stages, it will be harder for the child to become a skilled reader.

Robert Meyer, president and publisher of Ventris Learning LLC, a company that creates culturally and linguistically responsive curriculum, says this is how achievement gaps take root.

“If kids flounder through kindergarten, you’re humiliated and then you can’t do anything because everything — as you get to the end of kindergarten and first grade — depends on having had comprehension success and learning this mountain of alphabetic stuff,” he says.

Students of color, who tend to be poorer, are especially at risk because they may have fewer resources to help them if they’re not learning in school, he says.

The district has a long way to go in improving literacy rates for its African American students. According to the 2017-2018 Forward Exam that showed just 36.6 percent of Madison’s students were proficient or advanced in reading — only 9.8 percent of Madison’s black students were proficient or advanced.

Those disparities in early years become exacerbated as students age, Seidenberg says.

“If you outsource reading instruction, which is basically what happened with phonics, then you exacerbate those effects because only some families are going to have a person in the home who speaks the language, a person in the home who can spend the time with the child actually helping them with reading, or the financial resources to be able to find a reading specialist to help provide the things that used to be provided in school,” Seidenberg says. “This is clearly a way to multiply the existing gaps rather than to overcome them. It’s frankly a form of discrimination based on economic circumstances.”

Ryan Zerwer is one of the many parents who has relied on outside tutors to supplement his children’s reading instruction.

His daughters attend Shorewood Hills Elementary on Madison’s near-west side. One is in fourth grade, the other in second.

Zerwer says both girls were referred to and participated in Shorewood’s reading intervention program, where they each worked one-on-one with a reading interventionist for about 30 minutes a day.

While Zerwer doesn’t remember exactly what prompted the intervention, he says it was likely a combination of assessment scores and the fact that his daughters were reading books at a lower level than their grade.

Wanting to address the issue on all fronts, Zerwer also sought help from an outside tutor. The family connected with Schreiber-Poznik, after a recommendation from other parents.

His fourth-grader worked with Schreiber-Poznik throughout second and third grade, and his second-grader has been working with her this school year.

“Janice’s methodology for teaching reading made a lot more sense than what we were getting from the school, [which] just didn’t seem to be as focused on some fundamentals,” Zerwer says. “I think when I was a kid they called it ‘phonics’ — basically breaking down sounds letters make and understanding those sounds as parts of groups of words and understanding when those rules apply.”

While both of his daughters are now on the right track, the experience was frustrating. His eldest daughter is a “very right-brained, very creative child,” interested in stories.

“Well, the best stories are written,” Zerwer says. Before his eldest daughter got tutoring, getting the recommended daily 20 minutes of reading was exhausting for her. After the tutoring helped her develop reading skills, it became “more natural and it was less work to figure out what was written on the page,” Zerwer says. “Once you’re not spending so much mental energy [struggling to read], you’re able to actually enjoy the story.”

Schreiber-Poznik says there are “red flags” — students having trouble connecting sounds to letters or memorizing letter names, for instance — that teachers need to be able to recognize as evidence a child may need more time with the fundamentals.

“You can notice all of this in kindergarten and first grade if you know what to look for,” she says. If not caught early, she adds, skilled readers are able to move ahead, while those struggling fall far behind.

“I saw the emotional toll, what happens to a child’s self-esteem … seeing second and third graders with clinical depression because they sit and they can’t access the classroom curriculum,” Schreiber-Poznik says. “They’re thinking to themselves, something’s wrong with me, why can’t I learn?”

Seidenberg says the root of the problem lies with educators who don’t know the science.

“You have a community of educators — especially in Wisconsin — where they reinforce misconceptions about basic things about reading and what needs to be taught and what doesn’t need to be taught and what children learn on their own and what really requires instruction,” Seidenberg says. “So basically, they’re not taught how to teach reading because it’s assumed that every kid is different and that teachers have to figure out what will work for them and that the science is just not part of their training.”

One Madison teacher, who asked to remain anonymous, spent more than 10 years teaching upper elementary school. When she transitioned to first grade, she was surprised by how unprepared she was to teach early reading.

“I was flabbergasted to discover there was 30 years of scientific reading research I had never learned about while earning my teaching license, or at any professional development in [the district],” she says in an email.

Since then she’s immersed herself in the research, joined the Wisconsin Reading Coalition and the Reading League and read much of the literature on science-based reading.

“Here is what I’ve learned: our Fountas & Pinnell phonics program was given a dismal rating from the Iowa Reading Research center; our go-to intervention, Reading Recovery, teaches struggling readers that guessing at words based on pictures is a viable strategy; and Wisconsin’s African American readers rank last in the nation,” she says. “It’s not all [the district’s] fault. Our institutions of higher learning are not preparing future teachers how to teach reading, and there’s absolutely no excuse for it.”

Dykstra of the Wisconsin Reading Coalition emphasizes that Madison’s teachers need better support.

“I want this to be clear, in no way am I bashing teachers. Teachers are teaching the best way they know how, the way they’ve been trained according to materials that have been provided to them, according to coaching and guidance that’s been provided to them,” he says. “You know we’ve really let kids and families in Wisconsin down and very close behind them, the next group we’ve let down is teachers.”

Dykstra is hoping the state has a “come to Jesus” moment.

“We need to accept that we’ve screwed up, we need to accept that we need to be more instructive and directive, we need to accept that there are not two equally good approaches to this,” he says.

He’d like to see Wisconsin emulate Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and Kennewick, Washington — both of which addressed low reading proficiency with increased funding and targeted teacher training.

The state Department of Public Instruction also urges more funding, advocating for approval of Gov. Tony Evers’ proposed budget, which increases school funding and lifts property tax revenue caps. “Years of frozen funding for special education and bilingual education need to be reversed,” DPI writes in a statement, when asked for comment.

Meyer says investments can pay off. He notes that Mississippi — where African American students read nearly a year ahead of those in Wisconsin — made improvements by investing in statewide teacher training.

He also points to California, which has worked to eliminate linguicism, or discrimination based on the language someone speaks. “Researchers have determined that if your home linguistic system is different from the dominant dialect, it’s going to make learning to read and write even harder,” Meyer says.

Home language versus school language is something that’s highlighted in DAWS, one of Ventris Learning’s lesson resources. It helps students compare and contrast grammatical features common to African American English and Southern Vernacular English with mainstream English.

Meyer says one Madison school is planning on piloting the lesson material this year but wouldn’t specify which school.

“There’s a dominant dialect in the United States and most of us were brought up thinking there was a correct English, but to a linguist, there’s no such thing,” Meyer says. “And for young children, if you correct their home language it makes no sense linguistically. It’s never worked. Linguicism is racism, and non-mainstream language speaking people live it every day.”

But in order for Wisconsin to get better, both Meyer and Dykstra say things have to change.

“We’re way, way too comfortable with the status quo,” Dykstra says. “Every subgroup in Wisconsin — white kids, black kids, Hispanic kids, boys, girls, rich, poor — reads below the national average of their group. I mean that’s extraordinary. Nobody is doing okay in Wisconsin.”

Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham originally agreed to be interviewed for this article, but was then not available. The other three district officials interviewed sidestepped questions about the district’s poor reading scores while insisting that the methods used by the district are good and comport with DPI guidelines.

The district is in the process of revamping its reading curriculum for the first time since 2010, but how it will change remains to be seen.

According to Kvistad, the district has just begun the process of evaluating its core tools and resources at the elementary school level for literacy. Over the summer and fall, administrators plan to gather input from teachers, students and families to make sure they’re “selecting tools and resources and materials that are historically accurate, inclusive and culturally responsive.”

The hope is that by next spring — with the help of a grant from DPI — administrators will have a set of recommendations for the district to move forward with.

“We’ll be starting that work this summer as we really deeply learn about the standards and about high-quality materials that are out there,” Kvistad says. “We want to lift the voices of our students and our teachers in this process as well.”

Dykstra says that the Wisconsin Reading Coalition will continue promoting science-based reading practices and is eager to meet with legislators on both sides of the aisle to ensure any reading-related legislation is well crafted.

But Dykstra doesn’t see much happening until DPI takes a stand against balanced literacy. The agency sets academic standards for Wisconsin schools, but local districts have ultimate authority over curriculum.

He says that some arguments simply aren’t credible — noting the resurgence of “flat earth” theory — even if many people believe them.

“Reasonable people pick a side,” he says. “And they pick a side based on the best science and the best evidence.”