By Sarah Tantillo, Ed.D.

Sarah Tantillo, Ed.D. is the author of “The Literacy Cookbook” and “Hit the Drum: An Insider’s Account of How the Charter School Idea Became a National Movement.”

In Andy Weir’s novel THE MARTIAN, the main character uses knowledge, skills, and MacGyver-esque ingenuity to solve the myriad problems that arise for an astronaut stranded on Mars. But here’s the rub: almost every solution creates another problem. It’s a perfect metaphor for American education broadly. For today, let’s focus on literacy.

This recent Hechinger Report article points out that the “Mississippi miracle,” where that state’s fourth-graders went from near the bottom on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) literacy results in 2012 to above average in 2024, appears to have stalled out in eighth grade. The article raises an important question: If a state’s policy solutions work to strengthen the literacy performance of fourth-graders, why don’t those benefits persist for students when they reach eighth grade? And I would add: What should we learn from this situation?

In other words: How did Mississippi get here?

First, a brief history. One could argue that nationally, our literacy instructional problems took hold in 1987, when educational leaders in California adopted Whole Language as the method for teaching beginning reading in all of the state’s grade schools. They thought it was a solution. In the “Sold a Story” podcast, investigative journalist Emily Hanford explains why this happened and what the horrifying consequences have been. Many states followed California off that cliff. In New Jersey, many districts did, too. Six years later (in 1993), the NAEP results ranked California fourth-graders fifth from the bottom among the fifty states. Three years after that (in 1996), Californians were ranked at the very bottom (just behind Mississippi), with a staggering 77% of fourth-graders ranked “below grade level.”

After the 2000 National Reading Panel report essentially debunked the Whole Language approach, the term “whole language” disappeared. So, problem solved, right? Nope. The new approach that replaced it, called “Balanced Literacy,” was not much different. It offered at best a sprinkling of phonics. Students were still being taught to “look at the picture” (part of the ineffective “three-cueing approach”) instead of sounding out words, and some authors and publishers made a fortune on these “new” materials.

To counter this “Thank-you-for-sharing” response from educators, Congress tried a different tactic: accountability. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), signed into law in 2002, instituted annual statewide testing in grades 3-9 and 11 in English Language Arts (ELA) and Math. It had some benefits. By including more grades in the testing regime, more teachers (not just one in elementary, one in middle, and one in high school) were invested in student progress. The results shone a bright light on who was being well served and who was not. The demographic data presented a wake-up call, not just for urban districts but suburban as well. Educators began using data more systematically to drive instruction in order to meet students’ needs more effectively.

But this testing “solution” created problems, too, and one was this: “What gets measured gets done.” Because the tests focused on ELA and Math, schools worked harder to solve the reading problem. Their “solution” was more time for reading. “ELA minutes” increased. But we know what happened there: they spent more time using the wrong approach. And ironically, they also cut back on something that would have helped: they minimized social studies and science instruction. Students were learning less content and therefore had less background knowledge to inform their comprehension. Bottom line: They were not learning phonics AND their comprehension was increasingly diluted by a lack of content knowledge.

As with any research, there’s a danger that people will misconstrue the science of reading research, oversimplify the problem (“not enough phonics”), and in turn oversimplify the solution (“Just give them more phonics”). Phonics instruction alone is not enough to ensure that students become strong readers. Research shows that content knowledge informs comprehension. 

In 2013, Mississippi launched a statewide push on phonics instruction. Over time, their students learned to decode, which is PART of what it takes to be a strong reader. I don’t know what they did about social studies and science instruction. But I would bet they trimmed the content that could have steadily built students’ knowledge base, and their eighth-grade results reflect that. Are there potentially other factors, such as students spending more time on devices than reading books? Sure. But in schools, when it comes to literacy, we need to control what we can. Curriculum matters. All of it. Not just the ELA curriculum.

New Jersey schools must take the “both/and” approach: prioritizing effective phonics instruction alongside a rigorous, content-rich curriculum to ensure that our students aren’t just solving the immediate problem of sounding out words, but are also building a solid intellectual foundation in order to navigate our increasingly complex universe.