Alaska’s Poor Reading Scores Reflect Flawed Teaching Methods

According to the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released in October, only one in four of Alaska’s fourth-graders are reading as well as they should. 

While it’s tempting to blame this failure on the pandemic, it isn’t a new problem. Alaska ranked 49th in the nation in fourth-grade reading this year, and the state has ranked in the bottom five nationally since 2003. Parents should be grateful that Alaska’s schools opened quickly after the pandemic – with three-quarters of schools returning to in-person learning by June 2021 and the rest in hybrid learning – or the damage might have been even worse. Since 2019, the average U.S. student lost about four months of learning in fourth-grade reading, while Alaska didn’t slip much.

But that’s cold comfort when three in four Alaskan fourth-graders don’t know how to read.  

The root cause of this low performance? It goes back to teaching methods that train kids to use hints, not words themselves – and the problems with this approach became even more apparent during the pandemic. Unlike Florida and Mississippi, states that weathered pandemic disruptions well, most Alaskan students were simply not being taught the right way, a problem that compounded itself in the online and hybrid learning environment of the pandemic. 

Teachers cannot assume that students will catch up after third grade, either. Studies have shown that students who are unable to read by third grade are likely to remain poor readers for the rest of their lives. Poor reading comprehension early on has a snowball effect by fourth grade, when students are expected to read in order to learn material in mathematics, science, and other subjects. Such students are four times more likely to fail to graduate high school on time, and those who enter the criminal justice system join the 7 out of 10 prison inmates who are functionally illiterate.

The whole language and balanced literacy approaches to reading, which began to take hold in schools in the 1980s, assume that if children are exposed to enough books, they’ll learn how to read. These curriculums teach kids to use pictures and context from the rest of the sentence, or simply skip words they don’t know. The sounds that letters make are treated as one cue out of many that could tell the child what the word or sentence means. 

This approach is deeply embedded in curriculums used nationwide and in Alaska. A federally funded study of Reading Recovery, a curriculum used in one Alaskan school district, showed that students receiving the program scored lower on state assessments than students not using it. Almost 20 Alaskan districts adopted curriculums, like Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt’s Journeys, that offer evidence-based phonics, but only as part of a broad and “overwhelming“ menu that allows teachers to pick and choose what they teach. 

Though its effectiveness has been well-documented, teaching kids to understand the relationship between sounds and letters, and to use it to sound out words, remains remarkably rare. Many educators aren’t given explicit instruction in using science-based reading methods during their time in college, which makes it all the more important that teachers be trained when they enter schools. The research community has known for a while that teaching kids bad reading methods doesn’t produce skilled readers, but the findings haven’t made their way into most teachers’ colleges or classrooms.

The economy lags when its workers cannot read well, and the price paid by individuals and families is incalculable. Reading is too important to leave to chance. Thankfully, Alaska has taken steps this year to fix this sorry state of affairs.

In June, Governor Mike Dunleavy signed the Alaska Reads Act, establishing several programs modeled after successes in Mississippi and Florida. The Alaska Department of Education and Early Development will screen statewide for reading problems in early grades, provide intensive intervention for struggling students, support the lowest-performing schools in the state, and train teachers in the science of reading. The department will be offering professional development opportunities for teachers as well as providing evidence-based curriculum materials to make the transition easier – particularly important given that curricula in many districts do not meet the department’s expectations.  

Carefully and deliberately implementing the standards of the Alaska Reads Act will ensure that teachers are using science-based methods to teach reading and build a solid foundation of literacy in Alaska.