July 15, 2026
Contributing Author: Dr. Douglas Reeves
Ask a hundred teachers what “the science of reading” means, and you’ll get a hundred different answers. Most of them incomplete. That’s the real story behind Fordham’s new survey, unpacked in a Q&A with Kari Kurto of The Reading League.
The encouraging news first: teachers are getting better at phonics. They understand the value of breaking words into parts. There’s growing sensitivity to the needs of students with dyslexia and English learners. Progress, real progress, has been made.
Now the sobering part. Only 2% of teachers report learning evidence-aligned reading practices in their pre-service training. That means nearly every teacher standing in front of a classroom today learned how to teach reading after the fact, on the job, through trial and error, not in the university classroom where it should have started. 56% primarily associate dyslexia with letter reversal. And the gap is widest exactly where it matters most: high-poverty schools and upper grades.
Here’s the deeper problem. Too many educators and curriculum vendors have shrunk “the science of reading” down to phonics and little else. It is not just phonics. It is phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary, oral language, writing, and comprehension, working together. When we let phonics stand in for the whole, we hand ammunition to critics and shortchange kids.
Knowledge-building curricula matter, but knowledge alone won’t carry a student through an unfamiliar text. Students still need strategies to identify key ideas and reason through unfamiliar content. One of the best ways students demonstrate and deepen that reasoning is by writing about what they read. Across the 90/90/90 research, schools that made nonfiction writing a regular, rigorous habit saw achievement gains that spilled over into reading, math, and science, not just writing scores. Yet writing still gets treated as an afterthought in far too many classrooms, for the same reason teachers struggle with reading science: nobody trained them to teach it well. I recommend Chapter 7 of Fearless Instruction for a blueprint on implementing Nonfiction Writing. The short version is this: reading and writing were never meant to be taught separately, and schools that treat them as one connected discipline get better results.
And here is the line worth underlining: what works in a research setting is not automatically what works in a classroom. The fix isn’t more top-down mandates. It’s genuine collaboration between researchers, leaders, and the teachers doing the work.
The takeaway for leaders: Don’t just add the science of reading to the pile. Protect the time needed for successful literacy outcomes. That means expanding instructional minutes for literacy, cutting programs that no longer earn their place, and auditing how much of the school day actually serves instruction versus simply competing with it. Awareness has grown. Now leadership must catch up.
Link to research article: https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/what-recent-survey-tells-us-about-teachers-and-science-reading
Fearless Instruction: https://www.creativeleadership.net/books/
