What should a young reader do when they come to a word they don’t know?
It’s the most basic hurdle in reading, and the strategies a teacher gives can make the difference in a student’s literacy development.
A new study by the research group RAND Corp. suggests primary teachers in states with comprehensive early literacy laws—those that include pre- and in-service teacher training and curriculum requirements for teaching foundational reading skills—are more likely to give students evidence-based strategies for tackling text than those in states with laxer laws.
But in many cases, K-2 teachers continued to use some classroom materials that did not meet standards for teaching foundational reading skills in phonics, phonemic awareness, and fluency—though many of them mixed them with materials that did address those topics.
In all, the findings paints a mixed picture of the implementation of “science of reading” laws—or at the very least, an incomplete shift in teachers’ practice.
“Teachers in a lot of states might be getting a piece of the puzzle, but not the whole puzzle” for teaching foundational reading skills, said Anna Shapiro, a co-author of the study and an associate policy researcher at RAND.
The findings also mirror a 2022 special reporting project from Education Week, which also found gaps in how schools and teachers were responding to the push for evidence-based reading practices.
Behind states’ new reading laws
In reading, foundational skills typically refer to students’ learning how to “crack the code” of recognizing the sounds in English and how they’re mapped onto letters. But skilled reading includes more than just these word recognition elements—students must also learn the structures of written English, to read with increasing fluency, and to draw on their background knowledge and expanding vocabulary to understand what they read.
Mississippi was the first state to adopt a comprehensive law based on the science of reading, in 2013. Education leaders have credited Mississippi’s rapid improvement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress since then to the state’s overhaul of reading curriculum, pre- and in-service teacher training, and interventions focused on decoding and word recognition, vocabulary, and fluency in early grades.
More than 40 states—23 in the last two years alone—have followed suit with laws in a similar vein. But their early reading policies vary significantly; some focus on PD, some on curriculum, and some address multiple areas. Not all the laws included funding to implement the changes.
“Some of these states have essentially unfunded mandates. They said, ‘you need to do this,’ and then didn’t provide any funding for the school districts to buy new materials,” Shapiro said.
“And then other states like Mississippi have put a ton of money into not just requiring these things, but actually providing school districts with the resources to implement them,” she said. “Those two different approaches are pretty important for how these things actually get implemented.”
Mississippi’s rising test scores suggest the influx of resources coupled with its new approach appear to be increasing achievement, she said.
An ongoing Education Week tracker shows that while 40 states have passed new laws about the science of reading, they have different emphases. Far more include that include professional development on reading than on preservice teacher preparation.
For the study, RAND researchers analyzed a nationally representative sample of more than 1,800 K-5 elementary teachers in spring 2024, asking them about their background, the techniques for teaching reading they use, and their use of curriculum materials. The findings suggests those laws have reshaped teaching—but only in fits and starts.
On the one hand, teachers with fewer than five years’ experience were more likely than those with more experience to say they’d had preservice preparation aligned with the science of reading, suggesting some preservice training has begun to change with regard to foundational reading skills. These less experienced teachers also were more likely than teachers with more experience to use evidence-based classroom materials.
But only a dozen states and the District of Columbia have passed more comprehensive reading laws that require teachers to use new curricular materials—in addition to pre- and in-service training.
Shapiro and her colleagues found that nearly 75 percent of K–2 teachers and 66 percent of teachers of grades 3-5 received professional training on how to teach foundational reading skills in the 2023–24 school year.
“I think that highlights that kind of discontinuity in the policy,” Shapiro said. “If you have a preservice requirement, but you don’t have any sort of curriculum requirement, you might be teaching the teachers new useful information in professional learning, but then they’re going back and using a material that is telling them to use ‘three cueing’—and that in and of itself is not compatible. It illustrates that these policy pieces do kind of need to work together in order for teachers to get something that is consistent and actionable.”
Instructional material use varies
The findings do suggest that three-cueing—an approach relying on context clues to word-reading that, in practice, tends to subordinate phonics—has diminished as an instructional practice.
Teachers in states that required professional development, RAND found, tended to take a different approach to helping their students read unfamiliar words than teachers in other states. For example, they were 8 percentage points more likely to point students to suffixes, prefixes, and recognizable pieces—or morphemes—to understand an unfamiliar word.
Teachers also differed by grade level. Shapiro found that 69 percent of K-2 and 45 percent of 3-5 teachers direct students to sound out letter sounds in an unfamiliar word. About 25 percent of K-2 teachers and 42 percent in higher grades would advise students to look for morphemes. Both of these strategies are considered backed by reading science.
About 4 percent of early-grades teachers and 10 percent of upper elementary teachers said they would tell students to first look for contextual clues in surrounding words or pictures, a feature of three-cueing associated with less fluent reading development.
Though many states have updated the curricula used to teach reading, RAND researchers found this did not always translate to teachers using materials that support effective practices.
About a third to a quarter of teachers across grades K-2 didn’t use any materials that supported effective instruction in phonics, phonemic awareness, or fluency. (The ratings of materials were pulled from those issued by the separate nonprofit EdReports. The majority of teachers in each grade used materials that met standards in at least one of those components, however.
“K-12 teachers tend to be generally positive about the materials they use—but then you’ll also see that they’re reporting that they’re kind of mixing and matching materials that they’re modifying,” Shapiro said. “It’s sort of a disconnect ... [as if] they’re thinking to themselves, ‘they’re good after I made all those changes.’”
Later this year, the group plans to release a follow-up study analyzing how English/language arts instructional materials have changed over the last five years.
