National Reading Panel

No, I think it's I think there's a lot of truth in that.

And I think, you know, again, the National Reading Panel that was actually created in the Clinton administration and then was part of No Child Left Behind, where the brain scientist helped us settle once and for all the reading wars.

And it said that phonics, phonemic awareness, print awareness.

Now we call it the science of reading.

We tried to bring some of it back, but when we try to bring it back, just like me trying to take aspects from other cultures and it doesn't work, we got ourselves into a mess.

So in 2000, Congress put together the National Reading Panel, because our reading numbers were in the United States.

So let's get all the top researchers in the United States, bring them together, and try to figure out where the problem is.

Well, they did decide phonics was the way to go.

Mississippi... tackled the literacy problem by ensuring that teachers applied the science of reading.

This is something that actually was brought to national prominence by the National Reading Panel's Year 2000 report that calls on educators to teach, wait for it, we're talking about reading, phonics, how to help children systematically match letters to sounds, and how to supplement that learning with background knowledge and vocabulary to aid comprehension.

Mississippi passed its Literacy-Based Promotion Act in 2013.

That requires, under the law, that children scoring at the lowest level of reading performance be held back at the end of third grade.

"For years now," she writes, "the education world has been fascinated by the story of how Mississippi tackled our literacy problem by ensuring teachers applied the science of reading.

That's the set of principles and practices brought to prominence by the National Reading Panel's 2000 report," 26 blanking years ago, friends, "that called on educators to teach phonics again, to help children systematically match letters to sounds and supplement that learning with background knowledge and vocabulary to aid comprehension." And then Mississippi passed a Literacy Basic Promotion Act, which required children scoring in the lowest level of reading performance to be held back at the end of third grade, and the state began offering teachers and school administrators training and required training and coaching for the lowest-performing elementary schools.

And what they found was n- nobody wants the kids to be held back.

Nobody's happy about that.

And again, there have been no kind of head-to-head studies in terms of overall dosage or duration, but we do have a couple of meta-analyses, including a very recent one that was published within the past two years by Rebellion colleagues, where what they found was that the optimal cumulative dosage, and this is not necessarily for kids who are really having difficulties with this, but it was around 10.2 hours total.

And that fits with what the National Reading Panel had found.

Although again, there's another man analysis that found no association between dosage and outcomes.

But I think it's important to realize no one's expecting an hour long phonological awareness lesson, right? Like these are 10 to 15 minutes, quick, brief, and we should keep that kind of 10 hour mark in mind.

So one of the things that I like to tell people is that back in 1997, one of my first pieces of legislation that I supported as Deputy Legislative Director to then Governor George W. Bush in Texas was the Reading Bill.

So that was after the National Reading Panel had met and had provided their recommendations.

And in Texas, those were implemented.

So now come full circle, however many years later, many, many years later, and now we're talking about the science of reading.