The “science of reading” movement has brought sweeping changes to the curriculum teachers use in the classroom and the professional development they take—but educators still voice substantial disagreement over what they believe to be best practice for teaching students to read, according to a new, nationally representative survey.
The poll, from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the RAND Corp., asked more than 1,200 K-3 teachers in the fall of 2025 about their perspectives on reading instruction, the practices they use in their classrooms, the training they received, and the materials they use.
While most teachers said they favored the use of phonics instruction to teach children how to read, about a third said they mixed phonics with cueing, a discredited approach that experts say can make it harder for children to become fluent readers. When asked about best practices for supporting English learners and students with dyslexia, teacher responses showed some gaps in knowledge. Educators offered varying perspectives on how best to organize reading comprehension instruction.
In analyzing responses for trends, the report’s authors found that teachers who had completed professional learning, and teachers in states that had adopted science of reading-aligned licensure tests, were more likely to answer questions about best practice correctly.
“We still have a lot of work to do,” said David Griffith, the national research director at the Fordham Institute, and one of the co-authors of the report along with Fordham’s national research manager, Brian Fitzpatrick.
“It’s really difficult to change practice,” Griffith said. “Despite some correlational evidence that professional development is having an effect, despite some correlational evidence that licensure exams are having an effect, despite some correlational evidence that curriculum is having an effect, all of these things are helping on the margins.”
Over the past decade, more than 40 states have passed legislation requiring that schools adopt evidence-based approaches to reading instruction. From the very beginning of the push, experts in reading instruction and policy implementation have warned how hard it is to change classroom practice. Even large-scale professional development programs and overhauls to the curricula schools use don’t always translate to shifts in teaching methods.
Complicating matters are emerging debates about whether newly adopted programs actually follow evidence-backed recommendations. As states and districts have crafted lists of approved materials, some researchers and teachers have argued that curricula marketed with a “science of reading” slogan don’t always align with best practice.
The results offer a “really robust” overview of a rapidly changing environment, said Kari Kurto, the director of policy and partnerships at the Reading League, an organization that advocates for evidence-based reading instruction.
It’s not surprising that there’s variation in teacher responses, said Allison Hepfer, an instructional coach in the Bethlehem Central school district in Delmar, N.Y. The district made the switch five years ago to what Hepfer calls a “structured, systematic” approach to literacy.
“For a long time,” she said, “using that balanced literacy approach, using those three-cueing systems, that was very deeply ingrained in our practice.”
4 in 5 teachers have completed science of reading PD
Prompted by reporting and data that showed many schools weren’t adequately teaching foundational skills, the “science of reading” movement has led states to mandate new training for teachers and require schools to review—and often replace—the materials they use.
The Fordham survey maps the broad scope of these changes.
Eighty-two percent of teachers said they had completed at least one training aligned to the science of reading in the past 2-3 years. Foundational skills emerged as a major focus—84% of teachers who did this reading PD said phonics, or how letters represent sounds, received “a lot” or “some” focus; 83% said the same of phonemic and phonological awareness.
Reading comprehension, vocabulary, oral language, and content knowledge all scored lower, as did support for English learners and students with learning disabilities.
Most common among these trainings was Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, or LETRS.
The report’s authors found a correlation between completing reading training and teacher knowledge of reading research, as measured by other survey questions—suggesting that this PD appears to boost teachers’ understanding of evidence-based practices as intended, they write.
Still, it’s important to note that not all of these trainings focus on the same things, said Kurto.
For example, she said, LETRS covers multiple aspects of reading instruction, while professional development on the Heggerty program would only address the phonemic awareness skills that the materials teach. The two aren’t similarly comprehensive, she said.
Curriculum use has also shifted.
Seven years ago, Fountas & Pinnell reading products were among the most popular in a nationally representative EdWeek Research Center survey of K-2 teachers. Forty-three percent said they used the series’ intervention materials, which reading researchers have said use strategies that can make it harder for students to learn to read.
In Fordham’s survey, only 16% of teachers said they used Fountas & Pinnell products. The most commonly cited resource, used by 38% of respondents, was UFLI Foundations, a researcher-developed phonics program. (Fordham’s survey and the EdWeek Research Center survey are not directly comparable, but asked similar groups of teachers similar questions about reading curriculum use.)
Still, more than 90% of teachers in the survey reported using more than one curriculum, with 44% saying they used four or more. That makes it hard to understand how any one program is being implemented, said Griffith.
“This stuff is kind of sticky,” said John Humphries, the pupil services director in the New Lisbon, Wis., district, who co-leads the district’s literacy leadership team.
He recalled visiting a classroom a few months ago, when the teacher pulled out a resource that the district had asked educators to stop using.
“These materials get into the hands of teachers, and they stay there,” he said. Sometimes, that can be because leaders don’t offer alternatives or explain how new programs can meet teachers’ needs.
It’s the responsibility of school and district leadership, he said, to make those connections clear.
Most teachers favor phonics, but large minorities are ambivalent
Despite an emphasis across the states on foundational skills in teacher training, survey results showed that some teachers are still lukewarm on phonics instruction.
The survey asked whether teachers favored phonics or cueing, a strategy in which students are asked to use different clues from the text to identify the word on the page. With the cueing method, students could use the letters to help them sound it out, but they could also make an educated guess based on the pictures on the page or the sentence structure.
Sixty-eight percent of teachers in the survey said they favored phonics, 30% said both equally, and 2% said cueing. (In 2022, an EdWeek Research Center survey found that 61% of pre-K-2 teachers used cueing at least some of the time in teaching students how to read.)
Teachers in high-poverty schools were more likely to say they used cueing than their peers in low-poverty schools.
But when asked about concrete instructional moves, teachers’ answers shifted.
The survey asked teachers what they would do first when a student in their class had trouble reading an unfamiliar word. About 4 in 5 teachers said they would help the student break the word into parts to identify syllables or phonics patterns.
“I don’t think the news is all bad,” said Griffith. “When we asked more specific questions about what you should do, we often got better answers.”
Still, a small chunk of teachers didn’t show interest in using phonics across any of the question responses. “That’s a potential nontrivial share of America’s disadvantaged students,” Griffith said. “To me, that’s a red flag. There should be some philosophical commitment to explicit phonics instruction.”
What should comprehension instruction look like?
The survey also asked about comprehension instruction—a topic on which different advocates, policymakers, and curriculum developers champion different approaches.
Over the past two decades, reading comprehension lessons in elementary schools have often been focused on teaching generalizable comprehension skills, like finding the main idea of a passage.
But critics said that isolated skill practice didn’t actually lead to students gaining a deeper understanding of text, and took up time that teachers could have been using to build students’ content knowledge. Now, advocates of what’s known as “knowledge-building curricula” argue for schools to focus more on social studies and science content in reading classes, pointing to studies that show children with more general knowledge have higher reading comprehension skills.
Which approach is right? Research suggests that elements of both could lead to better outcomes. A few studies show that systematically building students’ content knowledge can make them better readers, but there’s also evidence that sepending limited time teaching students comprehension strategies—like how to parse text structure and summarize what they’re reading—can further their understanding.
Fordham favors a knowledge-building approach, and positions it in contrast to teaching comprehension strategies. (“I think we’re on the wrong track thinking about reading comprehension as some generalizable skill,” said Griffith, though he noted that there is still a place for close reading exercises or encouraging students to think about what they’ve read.)
Fifty-eight percent of teachers said they thought reading comprehension was dependent on a set of skills that could be applied to most texts, while 42% said that it depended on what students already knew about the topic and vocabulary.
When asked about the best way to improve reading comprehension, 3 in 5 teachers said building background knowledge across subjects. Nineteen percent said teaching students to identify the main idea, 17% said using leveled texts, and 5% said encouraging independent reading.
“We know that we need to lean in and focus on knowledge,” said Kurto. It’s not enough to only teach comprehension skills in short, disconnected text. But some strategy instruction is necessary, she said.
“They need to have some kind of scaffold, or support, to help them work through new knowledge when they encounter it.”
Fordham’s survey questions to gauge teachers’ understanding of the science of reading focus mainly on phonics and building student background knowledge, a lens Kurto contends is too narrow to clearly understand the state of the field.
Evidence-based instruction comprises dozens of practices across different domains of reading, she said, adding, “we want to have all of those in there.”
