Early this year, the Illinois Right to Read Act looked like a no-brainer. As originally written, the bill pushed teacher colleges, districts and schools to pay greater attention to phonics and phonemic awareness when teaching children to read. Right to Read proposed changing teacher training and creating a menu of “evidence-based” early reading curricula districts would be encouraged to adopt. And it got traction, fast.
Nationally, there’s growing momentum to make sure that longstanding, ineffective approaches to teaching reading are replaced with pedagogy that ensures students can crack the complicated code of written English. So far this year, seven states have passed laws intended to fix this problem, and more are being debated in statehouses right now.