The New York Times interviewed Rebecca Kockler, who leads Reading Reimagined, an Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF) program, about how the national movement to rethink reading has largely left out a generation of older students who are behind in literacy — and who will not recover without extra help.
If a child’s ability to decode words never reaches a certain level, it becomes extremely unlikely that their reading comprehension will advance, this recent ETS Research Institute landmark study found.
About 40 percent of children in America could fall below that level, says Rebecca Kockler, whose team is studying the issue with Stanford University Graduate School of Education researchers. She called the statistic “jaw dropping.”
Some students never received robust phonics instruction in elementary school. But even those who did may be able to break down a word like “cat,” while struggling with more complex ones like “education.”
