Remember that this decline in reading proficiency at 4th grade has knock-on effects throughout a child’s education. Remember, too, that the nation has invested countless dollars and years in studying the science of reading. Indeed, there is probably no other subject in which the science is better. But the nation wasted years and years pursuing ineffective approaches to teaching reading, including Lucy Calkins’s Units of Study and the “guided reading” system of Fountas and Pinell.
States are finally pushing back against this junk science and demanding that their reading instruction be based on the science of reading. (It is hard to overstate just how important the work of Emily Hanford and her “Sold a Story” podcast has been in driving this effort.)
But the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the nation’s premier education science agency, has not done its part. In the mid-2000s, motivated in part by the work of the National Reading Panel, the Institute launched one of its largest and most focused efforts: Reading for Understanding. This initiative spent around $130 million (around $250 million in today’s dollars) and helped lay a strong foundation for the science of reading. It was launched because of stagnant literacy rates in the nation and was based on the belief that the science of reading had progressed far enough to justify such a large investment.
If the stagnation of literacy rates in the mid-2000s was worrying enough to propel such a concerted effort, today’s falling literacy rates should be even more worthy of strategic intervention. To be sure, our understanding of the science of reading is far stronger 20 years later.
The culture of IES research centers supports “field-initiated research,” spreading its limited research dollars over many different topic areas. In 2024, IES’s National Center for Education Research spent over $100 million mostly on a series of “one-off” research projects spread over more than a dozen topic areas. Rather than coordinate projects to accomplish a mission-critical goal (such as halving the percentage of students scoring below basic in reading over the next five years), the center prioritized supporting research put forward by academic researchers, all too often reflecting their own interests rather than America’s needs.
Perhaps it’s time to launch another national reading panel, like the one that ran between 1997 and 2000. But we don’t have time to waste. We already know enough to refashion our approach to reading research. IES should launch a coordinated, large-scale research program focused on strengthening the foundations of literacy and on making sure that effective literacy programs are implemented. That coordinated research program should be positioned for maximum impact on America’s students, not at maximally supporting academic researchers producing obscure articles published in obscure journals.
