A wave of new laws across the country is attempting to transform how elementary school children learn to read. Most states have in recent years passed legislation aimed at aligning policies and practices with the “science of reading,” a term that has become associated with more phonics instruction but, if done well, also includes reading fluency, vocabulary building, comprehension and other skills.
What makes a current reading reform effort in New York state more unusual is its emphasis on strengthening the foundational skills of young children well before they reach kindergarten.
“Anything I’ve heard about the science of reading always seems to start with kindergarten, when the kid hits school,” said Jenn O’Connor, director of partnerships and early childhood policy at The Education Trust-New York. The organization is leading the effort to integrate the push for the science of reading with stronger preliteracy instruction for children ages birth to five.
But she added, “I wouldn’t want anyone to think we’re putting two-year-olds in classrooms at desks and drilling them on phonics.”
What the organization is asking for is that prekindergarten be included in a set of comprehensive reading reforms under consideration by the state legislature. The proposal calls for schools to use “scientifically proven” reading curricula by 2025, and to invest millions in retraining teachers.
Later this year, Education Trust also plans to release resources and ideas related to the earliest years. “It’s crucial to think about what children are getting even before they enter pre-K,” O’Connor said.
The effort in New York is an anomaly for even attempting to incorporate children younger than 5 in a meaningful way, said Susan B. Neuman, a professor of childhood education and literacy development at the Steinhardt School at New York University.
“For the most part, early childhood education and literacy reform are seen as very separate entities, and it’s very discouraging to me, frankly,” Neuman said.
Neuman believes that the heavy emphasis on phonics and decoding in the current reform efforts excludes not only children younger than 5 but many kindergarteners as well. In prekindergarten and at the start of kindergarten, the emphasis should be on encouraging kids to talk and develop their oral language skills, engaging teachers in responsive talking and listening to children and helping kids recognize letters and begin to understand the relationships between letters and sounds.
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“These years are a wonderful space where we could be doing so much in terms of instruction,” she said. Even though some states have described their reading reform efforts as encompassing pre-kindergarten through third grade, Neuman said none of the plans she has read spell out how the style and mode of instruction and teacher training should be different in pre-kindergarten and much of the kindergarten year. “I fear that some of them will actually say, ‘Let’s do phonics in pre-K,’” Neuman said.
Partly for this reason, the effort in New York includes some partners that have long modeled what effective literacy development can look like in children as young as infancy.
One of Education Trust’s nearly 80 partners, ParentChild+, works primarily in the homes of children ages 16 months to 4 years old, moving through a curriculum aimed at supporting caregivers to get the most out of reading with their child, and interacting with them in all kinds of settings. “We believe parents are the first and primary teachers of a child,” said Andre Eaton, ParentChild+’s New York director.
Early learning specialists, many of them parents who participated in the program themselves, visit homes twice a week for 46 weeks, modeling and guiding caregivers in terms of how they might teach their children about colors and numbers through books, for instance. In more recent years, ParentChild+ has adapted an abbreviated version of its curriculum for home-based child care providers.
“While I believe in the scientific methodology of phonics,” Eaton said, “we know the development of early literacy skills and the love of learning is really important early on.”
The bill in New York contains only one line specific to pre-K, noting that students at that age will be assessed based on their cognitive abilities and social-emotional learning. But for O’Connor, who pushed to add the line in a later draft of the bill, it’s a crucial step in the right direction to have anything in a piece of potential reading reform-related legislation specific to pre-K.
It’s a start at getting reading reform advocates thinking — and talking more about the youngest learners. And “whether the bill passes or not, [we] are committed to helping school districts and child care programs access resources,” she said.
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Sarah Carr has reported and edited for Hechinger since 2011. Currently, she covers early childhood education and manages the eight-newsroom Education Reporting Collaborative. She has written for The Washington Post, The Atlantic and Slate, winning several national awards.
This story about preliteracy was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
