Reading Instruction Program for Milwaukee Teachers a Great Idea

Photo by Jessica Ruscello on Unsplash

I had an earlier career before I became a journalist. I was a teacher at Shalom High School, an alternative school (long before the start of school choice) whose students were mostly Milwaukee Public Schools dropouts, and often far behind in reading skills. I later taught adult basic education at Milwaukee Area Technical College, a remedial class for adults with low reading levels, sometimes as low as second or third grade.

In nearly all cases phonics instruction worked the best. On occasion there was a student for whom the “see David run” sort of book worked better and they could figure out the words. And yes other approaches helped, too, such as flash cards with a word to learn and photo illustrating it. But phonics was the base.

After I became a father my son Brendan was attending a Montessori school, which had worked well for pre-school, but in first grade he wasn’t learning to read. So I bought a phonics book for young learners and we spent an hour for several evenings each week with Brendan progressing through the book’s lessons. In about three months he had basically learned to read.

It is heartbreaking to think of all the children in America who can’t read. The latest NAEP testing results found that 40% of fourth graders lacked even a basic level of reading comprehension and were well behind those who ranked as proficient.

The average reading score for Wisconsin’s fourth graders was no better, in fact exactly the same as the national score of 215. And Wisconsin has always been one of the worst states in the achievement gap between White and Black students, which is a crucial issue for Milwaukee, with the largest number of Black students in the state.

“There are 31,000 children in kindergarten through third grade attending both private and public schools in Milwaukee,” a story by Corrinne Hess reported yesterday. “But only about 3,000 of those kids are meeting targets in reading, according to data compiled by long-time education activist Howard Fuller.”

Fuller is the leader of a new group, the Milwaukee Reading Coalition, that wants to take on this issue. The coalition includes Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson, MPS Superintendent Brenda Cassellius, dozens of civic leaders and prominent members of the private and charter school community.

They seek to take advantage of a bipartisan law passed by the Wisconsin Legislature, and known as Act 20, requiring schools to teach the “science of reading,” as it’s been dubbed. The approach puts more emphasis on phonics and less on “whole language” instruction, which had dominated in schools for decades.

Act 20 allocated $50 million to purchase curriculum and train teachers in the science of reading, but it has been tied up in court. The money will go back into the state’s general fund if the suit isn’t settled by next month. But there could future funding passed by the Legislature.

The coalition’s idea is to insist that Milwaukee, which has 11% of children in the state, gets 11% of the funding for Act 20, which the Milwaukee Reading Coalition would use to train any teachers whether at MPS or private (choice or charter) schools. But Fuller tells Urban Milwaukee that his group also hopes to raise private money for this program and make it a private-public entity that funds any schools with kindergarten through third-grade students in Milwaukee that choose to provide this training for teachers.

The training could use the Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS) program, which has been dominating Science of Reading efforts in other states and which takes 160 hour of training. But there are several other programs, where the training can take as little as 60 hours.

And it not just about phonics. LETRS and these other programs are influenced by the 1997 National Reading Panel, which recommended an approach that includes “phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension.”

Still, there is little doubt that the “science of reading” movement was about emphasizing phonics more. In particular, it was a rejection of the approach pushed by Columbia University Professor Lucy Calkins, whose curriculum, “Units of Study,” was used at a quarter of the country’s 67,000 elementary schools, as the New York Times reported. “At Columbia University’s Teachers College, she and her team have trained hundreds of thousands of educators.”

Today she has added phonics to her approach. “All of us are imperfect,” she told the Times in 2022. “The last two or three years, what I’ve learned from the science of reading work has been transformational.”

The push for reform picked up in 2019, when national reading scores showed significant improvement in just two places: Mississippi and Washington, D.C. Both had required more phonics.

As of November 2024, 40 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws and policies on evidence-based reading practices in schools.

In the state Capitol, Gov. Tony Evers and Republicans are arguing over who should control any Act 20 funding, the Legislature or State Department of Public Instruction. There’s also the long-running debate of public schools versus voucher and charter schools, which inevitably arises in education discussions in Wisconsin. Fuller’s hope is that a program to improve reading for all Milwaukee children at all schools is one everyone can agree on.

“What we’re trying to do is take a very very narrow focus,” Fuller says, one that concentrates on literacy for the city’s children. If they don’t learn to read their future is bleak. A study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that students who were not proficient in reading by the end of third grade were four times more likely to drop out of high school.

This program could prevent that from happening.