Occasional Paper Series

In elementary classrooms across the United States and globally, the past five years have seen a dramatic change in the teaching of reading. Nearly every US state and dozens of countries worldwide have adopted new reading policies requiring public schools to implement what has been called the “Science of Reading” (SoR). Prior to the recent tidal wave of these policies, often called “Structured Literacy,” the “Science of Reading” referred broadly to interdisciplinary research on the cognitive and linguistic processes involved in learning to read and on reading difficulties such as dyslexia, rather than to a specific set of instructional mandates or to a detailed specification of the pedagogical expertise required to enact reading instruction. While SoR policies and regulations vary across states, districts, and sometimes even schools, too often this research base is translated into narrow mandates that require explicit, systematic instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics as the primary – or exclusive – tool for decoding words. In this way, many SoR policies and the commercial Structured Literacy curricula they require break from decades of reading instruction that taught students to make use of phonetic, semantic, and syntactic cues and that positioned reading as part of a broader set of literacy concerns, including support of heritage and home languages, through engaged, multimodal, and culturally informed reading and composing. Although SoR research addresses the need for a broader, systematic approach to the development of fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension, SoR policymaking often centers only the application of phonics to decoding in its mandates and curricular materials while ignoring the other critical components of reading instruction. Such policies fall short; while phonics is a critical aspect of learning to read, it represents only one facet of a comprehensive literacy program.

In Issue 55 of the Bank Street Occasional Paper Series, “Lessons from the Field on the Science of Reading,” we invited authors to document and reflect on changes in the teaching of reading as SoR policies impact practice in elementary classrooms. We were especially interested in the ways teachers and children experienced emotional, intellectual, and relational changes as SoR mandates became increasingly present in the time and space of schooling. As we have surveyed the published research and media coverage of SoR, we have found very little that documents the impact of SoR policies on daily classroom life from the perspective of teachers and children. With this issue, we hope to begin filling that gap. We hope that many teachers reading these essays will find encouragement in seeing that they are not alone and may find language to express their doubts and concerns as well as practices that may help them support their students.