Lamborn: New Mexico Should Use Science Of Reading Instruction
By PETER LAMBORN
My life changed dramatically at a school meeting during my son's 4th grade year. This particular meeting was reviewing test results to see how he had progressed over the last three years of special education. In my mind, this child was doing OK but not great at school. However, the test results painted a bleak picture. His scores, relative to his peers, had significantly dropped, with the worst scores related to his reading. I was blindsided.
Sadly, this experience is all too common. I later learned that many New Mexico students are poor readers. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, only 32% of New Mexico 4th graders are proficient readers. That means 68% of students struggle to read. That is a shocking number!
The meeting about my son's test scores started my deep dive into understanding reading instruction. I learned that there is clear scientific evidence of how to best teach reading. This body of evidence is called the Science of Reading.
The Science of Reading is a broad framework and not a set program. Students are taught how to read by breaking a word into parts. They use those parts to build words for spelling and writing.
The English language has 44 basic units of sound, called phonemes. Students need to be taught explicitly how to map the written words to those phonemes. For example, K is a phoneme in apping words to phonemes is essential to learning to read well.
The Science of Reading covers all the ways a phoneme can be written. In this way students explicitly learn all parts of the language, and they practice until they master them. Practicing allows students to internalize the rules and identify the same phoneme in many different words. It also means covering every phoneme multiple times. Practice will aid a student's understanding and reading speed, which is also consequential.
Often teachers don't teach about identifying phonemes. Instead, beginning readers are taught to look at the first letter of a word, look at the picture accompanying the text, or guess from context. These instructions can give a semblance of reading when used with beginner books, but utterly fail for anything more advanced. Many students will never learn to read well using this method.
Students are also encouraged to re-read the same books. Without instructions on phonemes, repeated re-readings lead some students to memorize words, which can look like reading, but leaves students unable to handle unfamiliar words.
After not getting effective reading instruction at their public school, my children began attending the May Center for Learning, a private K-8 school in Santa Fe. The May Center was life changing for them. I credit much of the improvement to reading instruction based on the Science of Reading.
Mississippi public schools have embraced the Science of Reading. Like New Mexico, Mississippi has high levels of poverty and has long been at the bottom of the nation's reading scores. In 2013 the Mississippi Legislature made major changes in how reading was taught in its public schools. I believe that the most important change was requiring reading instruction based on the Science of Reading. By 2019, Mississippi reading scores caught up to the national average. By 2022, Mississippi exceeded the national average in reading scores. I attribute Mississippi's drastic increase in reading scores to the use of the Science of Reading.
New Mexico ranks in the bottom three states in reading scores. If you think New Mexico schools should do a better job of teaching reading, I urge you to push for the Science of Reading.
The state Public Education Department is training school specialists for schools that have embraced the Science of Reading. It's a start, but it's a small number of specialists in the schools that have agreed to participate. The change needs to reach every school and every classroom. All teachers giving reading instruction need certification in the Science of Reading.
Like Mississippi, we could see a radical turnaround. Radically improving our teaching method will do more than merely adding more hours of the same kind of instruction that is already failing our children.
