Where School Choice Meets the Science of Reading Instruction
My state, Arkansas, has been an education trailblazer, known lately for efforts to transform reading instruction. The goal is to bring literacy instruction in line with decades of research on how young children learn to read.
The Arkansas Division of Elementary and Secondary Education developed rules for the various components of reading legislation. These rules outlined the process for ensuring that teachers are able to demonstrate proficiency or awareness in scientific reading instruction.
Lawmakers in our state are now working to craft policies to align instruction with what we know about how children learn to read.
The state has also launched R.I.S.E. (Reading Initiative for Student Excellence), which encourages a culture of reading by coordinating a statewide reading campaign with community partners, parents, and teachers.
For decades prior, however, the reading strategy was quite different – and counterproductive to reading acquisition. It involved prompting students to draw on context and sentence structure, along with letters, to identify words. This wasn’t an effective way for beginning readers to learn how to decode printed text. In fact, encouraging students to look at pictures and infer what makes sense from them takes focus away from the words themselves. Stuck in this approach, students will likely never use their knowledge of letter sounds to attempt decoding a word.
I recently attended the National Summit on education, where schools across the country were represented. I was disturbed to learn that many states have still not abandoned these failed practices. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, an advocate for scientific reading instruction, called access to such instruction the civil rights issue of our time.
It’s inexcusable that we haven’t made scientific reading instruction available to all American children. If your child attends a school that uses ineffective reading-acquisition strategies, I urge you to research your options.
School choice gives parents options to make the best educational choices for their children. In Arkansas, families can choose from traditional public schools, public charter schools, public magnet schools, private schools, and homeschooling. The idea behind school choice is that every child deserves a quality education. And because each student has his own set of talents, interests, and challenges, having a variety of options in education is crucial.
