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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: medium; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31);">READING & LITERACY </span><span style="font-family: Montserrat; color: rgb(31, 31, 31); text-transform: uppercase; letter-spacing: 1.2pt; border: 1pt none windowtext; padding: 0in;"><a href="https://www.edweek.org/opinion"><span style="color: blue;">OPINION</span><span style="color: blue; text-transform: none; letter-spacing: 0pt; border: none;"><o:p></o:p></span></a></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 11.25pt; font-size: medium; vertical-align: baseline;">https://www.edweek.org/opinion<b><span style="font-size: 24pt; color: blue;"><br>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: medium; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Montserrat; color: blue;"><a href="https://www.edweek.org/opinion"><span style="color: blue;">Teachers are struggling, students are the casualties<o:p></o:p></span></a></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: medium; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; font-family: inherit, serif; color: blue; border: 1pt none windowtext; padding: 0in;"><a href="https://www.edweek.org/opinion"><span style="color: blue;">By Elise Lovejoy — December 15, 2022 </span><span style="color: blue; border: none;"><o:p></o:p></span></a></span></div>
<ul type="disc" style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><li class="MsoNormal" style="color:#1F1F1F;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1;tab-stops: list .5in;vertical-align:baseline"><o:p> </o:p></li></ul>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: medium; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: inherit, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31); border: 1pt none windowtext; padding: 0in;">Elise Lovejoy</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31);"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: medium; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31);">Elise Lovejoy, a former K-2 teacher, is the founder of Express Readers, a K-2 foundational skills and reading program. She is an advocate for evidence-based literacy instruction and the mother of two boys who are both learning to read.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: medium; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31);">The reading wars are back in full swing in the form of a very public battle that gives lots of attention to people and opinions instead of </span><i><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: inherit, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31); border: 1pt none windowtext; padding: 0in;">facts</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31);">. An important fact, not opinion, is that children are struggling to read. To be exact, two-thirds of American 4</span><sup><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: inherit, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31); border: 1pt none windowtext; padding: 0in;">th</span></sup><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31);"> graders cannot read proficiently, according to the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress. People fighting to keep their positions of power or assert their dominance in the reading field are causing a mess for our teachers to wade through.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 26.25pt; font-size: medium; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31);">The people with the most prestigious professional associations get their voices heard. The people with the most expensive degrees get their advice translated as truths. And the people with the biggest followings continue to have the final say even after their words have proved to be untruthful.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 26.25pt; font-size: medium; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31);">When I was a young K-2 teacher myself, I, too, listened to all the biggest voices in the reading field, assuming they had done their research on reading and knew the best ways to support students. I had graduated from college with a degree in elementary education, received a glossy curriculum in my first school district, and read the pedagogy manuals as if they contained absolute laws.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 26.25pt; font-size: medium; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31);">What I didn’t understand in all my naiveté is that I had learned about reading programs, not reading methods, and that my first district bought a reading program based on a sales pitch without the assertion that it taught reading in the way that children learned. Instead of focusing on phonics, the students and I huddled in guided-reading groups and did picture walks. I facilitated guessing words based on the sentence, the first letter sound, or the picture provided.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 26.25pt; font-size: medium; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31);">It wasn’t until I watched other teachers focus on sounds and sound spellings in my next district that I even knew there was a problem with how I had been teaching reading. All of a sudden, words began to make sense to me, and my students could read books and text without pictures or predictable sentence cues.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 26.25pt; font-size: medium; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31);">But even with my new understanding, the materials, resources, and support I needed were scarce. I spent my nights and weekends on the internet gathering decodable books and activities that required students to practice sound-based skills, not whole-language memorization. In my subsequent districts, I felt tension with my colleagues who did not question their curriculum or the sources they were derived from. I bumped up against administrators who encouraged methods that pushed children to guess at words.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 26.25pt; font-size: medium; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31);">When I began my own in-depth research on the cognitive science behind reading instruction, I threw myself into developing my own curriculum and resources. As I talk to colleagues who have traveled a similar path for reading instruction, as I fight my own sons’ school district to see the disparity in reading scores, and as I read emails and posts by other literacy teachers, there is a shattering theme: Teachers are struggling.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 26.25pt; font-size: medium; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31);">Teachers are forced to find best practices, training, and resources for literacy during their personal time and often on their own dime.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 26.25pt; font-size: medium; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31);">Teachers are finding that they did not learn the correct skills or knowledge in their own education programs to systematically teach reading.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 26.25pt; font-size: medium; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31);">Teachers are working in communities filled with infighting because some of their colleagues cling to the failing methods.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 26.25pt; font-size: medium; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31);">Teachers are angry that former “experts,” mentors, professors, and administrators pushed methods that were most effective for children of privilege who had supplemental resources and support at home—an approach that left countless students behind.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 26.25pt; font-size: medium; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31);">Teachers are mired with guilt for those students they left behind by following shoddy reading curricula.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 26.25pt; font-size: medium; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31);">Teachers are going against their districts’ outdated reading methods to ensure all their kids can read, even at the risk of retaliation or punishment.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 26.25pt; font-size: medium; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31);">Teachers are fighting their way through the noise, all while trying to do the million other jobs we have given them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: medium; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31);">I was one of many teachers who once taught balanced literacy but struggled to learn the </span><i><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: inherit, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31); border: 1pt none windowtext; padding: 0in;">correct way</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31);">—reading methods founded and based on sounds and sound-spellings supported by reliable research on how children learn to read. I am just one of many other teachers living in the ruins of the reading wars, often blamed for the failures even as we fought to find the solutions to help children.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: medium; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31);">As that teacher, I am still trying to forgive myself for the students I once taught to guess their way through books with pictures and predictable sentences until the books lost the pictures and became too hard to guess accurately. The children whose families do not have the financial means to support them when my districts’ chosen reading program couldn’t meet their needs. The students who never learned to read and now struggle academically. The students who felt stupid because I never taught them </span><i><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: inherit, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31); border: 1pt none windowtext; padding: 0in;">how</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31);"> to read.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 26.25pt; font-size: medium; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31);">I, too, am one of the countless parents of a struggling reader. As a mom, I want both my sons to feel supported so that one day they can find the joy in a good book.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 26.25pt; font-size: medium; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31);">I am one in a growing village of science of reading advocates speaking at school board meetings in our district about the inequity that comes from not teaching reading in a structured, scientific, and systematic way. As a community member, I want my district administrators to do their jobs, the research, and their due diligence instead of making excuses for low reading scores.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: medium; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31);">The reading wars have become a battlefield for influential adults to fight for their own reputations, personal feelings, and egos. Education should be grounded in science about how our children learn </span><i><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: inherit, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31); border: 1pt none windowtext; padding: 0in;">and</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31);"> how we can support that learning process as effectively as possible. The people who count most—the reason we became teachers and the ones who hold our hearts as parents—are the children, and we can’t afford to keep letting them down in service of the comfort of adults.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 26.25pt; font-size: medium; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; color: rgb(31, 31, 31);">Our children need teachers who feel prepared, educated, and supported in methods based on the cognitive way children learn to read, before any more of them become collateral damage in this public battle. They need us to keep our focus on children, not the well-funded adults who are defending outdated and unfounded reading methods with their opinions<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: medium;"><o:p> </o:p></div>
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