Last week, New York City’s incoming schools chancellor made a stunning acknowledgment: The nation’s largest school district has been teaching reading the wrong way for 25 years.

David Banks said clearly that balanced literacy — an approach used around the country — doesn’t work, particularly for low-income students. Instead, phonics-based instruction is what students need.

This acknowledgement can be game-changing not only for New York City’s school children, but in schools across the country that ought to be examining whether they, too, have been teaching reading the wrong way.

The science of how kids learn to read is clear and direct. Reading is a code, and to crack the code, you teach the code. There are 26 letters, some having more than one sound. When some of those letters combine, there are even more new sounds. Learning to read means gaining the ability to hold these different sounds and sound combinations in your brain and then honing those skills to access them at an increasingly fast rate. A strong and effective phonics program unlocks comprehension, as fluent, accurate readers free up their mental space to grapple with increasingly complex words — and complex themes.

Under balanced literacy, schools mix phonics with a “whole language” approach. Rather than teaching letter sounds and combinations, it sprinkles phonics into an environment filled with books under the theory that this will organically produce new readers. The problem is that this ignores decades of research into the science behind how kids’ brains actually learn how to read.

The effects have been devastating, particularly for children of color and from low-income backgrounds. In New York City, for example, under balanced literacy, fewer than 30 percent of fourth graders were proficient in reading in 2019, according to federal data.

Allowing poor reading skills to go unaddressed is the equivalent of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. The reading rich will continue to grow, because with every new book they read, they build new vocabulary and knowledge, which allows them to access even more complex text. But for the reading poor, a struggle to read will only deepen the deficit over time unless the child’s teachers intervene quickly at the point of error.

The good news here is that the incoming chancellor might now light a path for millions of children — not just in New York City, but in the rest of the country as well, to ensure that educators no longer ignore the science of reading.

Read the full article about teaching reading by Juliana Worrell at The 74.