Five years after the pandemic forced children into remote instruction, two-thirds of U.S. fourth graders still cannot read at grade level. Reading scores lag 2 percentage points below 2022 levels and 4 percentage points below 2019 levels.

This data from the 2024 report of National Assessment of Educational Progress, a state-based ranking sometimes called “America’s report card,” has concerned educators scrambling to boost reading skills.

Many school districts have adopted an evidence-based literacy curriculum called the “science of reading” that features phonics as a critical component.

Phonics strategies begin by teaching children to recognize letters and make their corresponding sounds. Then they advance to manipulating and blending first-letter sounds to read and write simple, consonant-vowel-consonant words – such as combining “b” or “c” with “-at” to make “bat” and “cat.” Eventually, students learn to merge more complex word families and to read them in short stories to improve fluency and comprehension.

Proponents of the curriculum celebrate its grounding in brain science, and the science of reading has been credited with helping Louisiana students outperform their pre-pandemic reading scores last year.

In practice, Louisiana used a variety of science of reading approaches beyond phonics. That’s because different students have different learning needs, for a variety of reasons.

Yet as a scholar of reading and language who has studied literacy in diverse student populations, I see many schools across the U.S. placing a heavy emphasis on the phonics components of the science of reading.

If schools want across-the-board gains in reading achievement, using one reading curriculum to teach every child isn’t the best way. Teachers need the flexibility and autonomy to use various, developmentally appropriate literacy strategies as needed.

Phonics programs often require memorizing word families in word lists. This works well for some children: Research shows that “decoding” strategies such as phonics........

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