Many of California’s public schools are failing to teach all of our students to read because they use programs that don’t follow the science of reading. Teacher-training programs ignore science as well.
What works best for most students promotes explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and systematic instruction in phonics and methods to improve fluency and comprehension.
Louisa Moats, a national reading expert, writes: “The body of work referred to as ‘the science of reading’ is not an ideology, a philosophy, a political agenda, a one-size-fits-all approach, a program of instruction, or a specific component of instruction. It is the emerging consensus from many related disciplines, based on literally thousands of studies, supported by hundreds of millions of research dollars, conducted across the world in many languages. These studies have revealed a great deal about how we learn to read, what goes wrong when students don’t learn, and what kind of instruction is most likely to work the best for the most students.”