After years of stagnant reading scores in Wisconsin, some school districts are using federal pandemic aid to rethink their literacy instruction.
Cudahy, a school district south of Milwaukee with about 2,000 majority low-income students, overhauled its literacy instruction in grades K-5 to follow the science of reading.
WUWM visited Cudahy's Kosciuszko Elementary School to learn more.
Cudahy’s already unsatisfactory reading levels got worse during the pandemic. In spring 2021, just one in four third graders were proficient in English Language Arts on the Forward exam.
In the past, when those struggling readers showed up in Allison Rutke’s fourth grade classroom, she wasn’t sure how to help them.
"We were under the impression that the more they read, the more they would learn how to read," Rutke says. "And at fourth grade, it was hard because we had all these kids who couldn’t read, and we didn’t know why."
Cudahy was following a “balanced literacy” approach. Kosciuszko reading specialist Candice Johnson, a former second grade teacher, says it consisted mainly of whole-group lessons with the teacher reading out loud and small groups doing "guided reading" using Fountas and Pinnell leveled books.
If a student got to a word they didn't know, teachers used a "three-cueing" strategy, where they told students to guess the word based on letters, pictures and context, rather than sounding it out. Scientists who study reading say three-cueing does not teach children to be skilled readers. But many American schools still use it.
Second grade teacher Samantha Ashlin Deane says the general idea was this: students will learn to read if you help them love to read.
"So much in balanced literacy was like, let’s read this cute story together, and now I’m gonna talk to you about it and we’re gonna say how we felt about it," Ashlin Deane says. "There was still skills and strategies and there were comprehension lessons, but it didn’t have the impact for them to retain it."
That changed last year. Cudahy used federal pandemic money for a $250,000, three-year contract with a consulting company called Schools Cubed. The district also spent about $60,000 on literacy curriculum.
Schools Cubed helps schools overhaul reading instruction using the science of reading. Superintendent Tina Owen-Moore heard about good results in Thorp, another Wisconsin district that worked with Schools Cubed.
"This seemed like the work that we could focus in on both to improve instruction overall and also to target the loss students had experienced because of the pandemic," says Owen-Moore.
The science of reading refers to the science behind how the brain learns to read. A key element is systematically, explicitly teaching students how letters and sounds connect, through phonics and phonemic awareness instruction. In Cudahy's balanced literacy days, phonics was sprinkled in to lessons but was not a big priority, according to staff.
Under Cudahy's new "structured literacy" approach, teachers in the early elementary grades deliver roughly ten minutes of phonemic awareness instruction, 20 minutes of phonics, ten minutes of vocabulary, and 20 minutes of reading comprehension. That's followed by small group instruction, where students who need help in a certain skill get a "double dose" of instruction.
On a recent afternoon, second grade teacher Jennifer Christensen delivered a fast-paced phonemic awareness lesson from a curriculum called Heggerty. Her students quickly picked up on the individual letter sounds to create whole words.
"First word, four sounds — chop with me: Ss-kah-ah-buh."
"Scab!" students respond, using their hands to "chop" each letter sound as Christensen says them.
"Four sounds: ss-uhl-ah-puh," Christensen says.
"Slap!" the students respond.
The instruction is repetitive and includes lots of call-and-response.
"I think in the past, we would often teach something once and assume students had it," says superintendent Owen-Moore. "And I think that’s been a big piece of the knowledge, is just how many repetitions it takes for students to put that into their brains, so you see a lot more of that now."
As you get to third through fifth grade, there’s less basic phonics, more comprehension lessons and harder vocabulary. But the repetition and call-and-response elements are still there.
This change didn’t happen easily. Teachers were skeptical, and a bit defensive.
"It was really hard," says fourth grade teacher Christine Janusiak. "It was very structured, our schedule was not our own, our schedule was created for us. And we were told to just do it. It felt like I had to abandon everything I had learned before and start fresh."
The Schools Cubed consultants worked with Cudahy principals and literacy coaches, who then trained teachers. Second grade teacher Samantha Ashlin Deane, who is also co-president of the local teachers' union, says it wasn’t a perfect rollout. But soon enough, teachers understood why they were doing it.
"We are reaching the students who would have fallen through the net of our whole group instruction," Ashlin Deane says. "They were not receiving explicit phonics instruction, or they were receiving it and just not getting enough repetitions to master it. And our thinking started shifting to understand reading as skill-based...you need the foundations and you need the skills to build upon each other for a student to become a skilled reader. And that was transformational."
Kosciuszko Principal Melissa Kostka says another important change is that Cudahy is now assessing students more often, using a tool called FastBridge. They use the assessment data to see which students need small-group instruction or interventions in certain skills.
"With balanced literacy, the data collection was few and far in between, maybe three times a year, versus weekly and being able to adjust our instruction accordingly," Kostka says.
Allison Rutke says she feels like an effective reading teacher now. Though, it's difficult to look back on the students who didn't benefit from the science of reading-based instruction.
"We always talk about kids we wish could go back and if we did this one thing with this kid – but it’s not about being able to fix what we didn’t know before," Rutke says. "Now that we know better, we have to do better. And that’s just kind of our motto, that all these kids now, we’re giving them the opportunity to read."
In the first year using the science of reading, the number of Cudahy third through fifth graders proficient in English Language Arts rose by seven percentage points, which is two points ahead of statewide gains.
At Kosciuszko Elementary, the percent of students proficient in reading doubled in one year, to 42%. Leaders say they don't remember ever seeing that level of growth in just one year.
Now in the second year of the new reading instruction implementation, Cudahy leaders hope to make even bigger gains, with the goal of getting 95% of students to be proficient readers.
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