All Maryland public schools will emphasize phonics and vocabulary when teaching kids to read starting next year, according to a plan unveiled Tuesday during a state school board meeting.
Interim State Superintendent Carey Wright unveiled a resolution that calls for all public schools to begin using Science of Reading methods starting in the 2024-25 school year.
Many school districts across the D.C. region transitioned to using the Science of Reading approach to literacy instruction to help kids catch up after the pandemic. Those strategies involve phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension, according to a state news release, instead of context clues.
“This is something that’s very near and dear to my heart,” Wright said. “I have lived this work. I have done this work. I have done this work in very difficult circumstances with an entire state that had very low expectations for children. And this is not one of them. Maryland, I think, has very high expectations for its children.”
Wright, a former state superintendent in Mississippi, has been credited with using the Science of Reading to help students’ reading scores improve there. Sometimes, it’s characterized as the “Mississippi Miracle,” as Wright said Tuesday, that the state’s fourth graders “scored first in the nation, and our children in poverty outperformed their peers nationally” on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the nation’s report card.
The Science of Reading, school board member Joan Mele-McCarthy said, is supported by research on how the brain works.
“We know what the brain does when the brain reads,” Mele-McCarthy said. “And we know what the brain doesn’t do when the brain doesn’t read. We have neuroscience that explains what the brain does.”
In Maryland, according to the resolution, the NAEP reading proficiency rate for fourth graders is 31%. It’s 32% among eighth graders.
Maryland’s average score among fourth graders fell from 24th in the nation in 2015 to 40th in 2022. Scores for eighth graders fell from 18th in the nation in 2015 to 25th in 2022, the resolution said.
“We are learning that this is the right way to go in terms of ensuring that all students learn to read well,” Joshua Michael, vice president of the state’s Board of Education, said. “And then we build on that throughout the rest of education.”
The transition also comes with an ambitious goal. Maryland is aiming to be ranked among the top 10 states in fourth and eighth grade reading NAEP scores by 2027.
The resolution calls for the state superintendent to create a literacy policy and review all state standards, policies and regulations, to make sure they align with the Science of Reading.
The goal, Wright said, is to “make sure that teachers and leaders have the skills that they need in order to teach children to read.”
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