Missouri Bets on 'Science of Reading' to Reverse Years of Falling Scores

Missouri education officials are steering schools toward a new way of teaching reading, drawing on what is known as the science of reading, an umbrella term for research-backed instructional methods that have grown in popularity in recent years. The effort comes as the state's reading scores have fallen for years.

The push includes several new laws, one of which takes effect this week, along with a statewide program to train elementary English teachers to rethink how they teach. Educators hope the approach can address the state's struggle to teach every child to read.

In the St. Louis area, KIPP elementary schools offer a view of the method in practice. The charter network has spent a few years shifting toward a research-backed curriculum, and about 70% of its English teachers are taking an intensive professional development course on the techniques. KIPP Victory Academy students posted the state's top English language growth scores in the 2020-21 school year, according to St. Louis University's PRiME center, even though overall test scores there remain low. PRiME researchers say growth is a useful measure because raw scores often reflect students' socioeconomic backgrounds, while growth shows whether students are improving.

On a December Monday at Victory Academy in the West End neighborhood of St. Louis, first-grade teacher Allison Feldmann, who is partway through the training, led her class through a sound-blending exercise. Wearing a voice-amplifying headset, she asked students to say "damp" and then swap one sound to make "lamp." Students folded their arms in front of them, "Macarena" style, as they swapped sounds. The drill builds phonemic awareness, which science of reading classes teach alongside phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. Those terms have also been written into several Missouri education laws.

At the state board of education's December meeting, officials reviewed Nation's Report Card results showing steady declines in Missouri reading scores since 2015, with a sharp drop after the pandemic began. The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is rolling out a course called LETRS, the same program Feldmann is taking. It can require more than 160 hours over two years. The state has funding for 15,000 teachers in kindergarten through fifth grade, and about 9,000 have at least started.

Lawmakers also passed changes last session that are already in effect. One makes elements of the science of reading a required subject for teachers in college and other training institutions. Another requires schools to offer an evidence-based reading program to elementary students. The law that takes effect this week mandates reading tests for kindergarten through third grade at the start and end of each school year to identify students who are behind or at risk for dyslexia. Parents of those students will be notified so the children can receive intensive reading instruction.

"We want to ensure that when you hear conversations across the nation about states who have been successful with reading improvement, Missouri needs to be part of that conversation," said Tracy Hinds, a deputy commissioner at the department.

Obstacles remain. Matt Burns, a University of Missouri special education professor, said training is a good start but teachers will need help applying it. "If we want this to happen, we have to have school districts have people on site who could help coach teachers," he said. Methods not supported by research are also still common: in roughly three out of four classrooms, teachers play down sounding out words and instead tell students to use context clues or pictures to guess unfamiliar words.

Feldmann said her school once taught that way. "We weren't really teaching kids to listen to the sounds in words," she said. Angela Jackson, an elementary literacy curriculum manager at KIPP, said the network had been telling children to guess a letter and look at the picture. Burns said other schools will need to make the same shift. Feldmann said the course has changed her perspective, calling it "a very deep dive" into her curriculum and the reasoning behind it.