[Hot Air] A study released today showed schools which trained teachers on the so-called science of reading (which features phonics) helped raise test scores in poorly performing schools.The program in about 70 low-performing schools yielded test-score gains for third graders in 2022 and 2023, on par with students having attended school for an additional quarter of a year in English and 12 percent of a year in math, according to a working paper by researchers at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education.
For about $1,000 per student annually, the program retrained teachers and administrators and paid for new classroom materials, better aligned to cognitive research.
The study, by Sarah Novicoff, a Stanford graduate student, and Thomas S. Dee, a professor of education, compared schools that participated in the program to a similar set of schools that did not. It has not yet been peer reviewed.
This is good news after years dominated by pandemic learning loss and a lingering absenteeism crisis. At last there might be something which could help make up for lost time. The study hasn’t been peer reviewed but the general findings favorable to phonics aren’t new. I’ve written before about how California got here. Being the progressive state that it is, California jumped on the bandwagon of the hot new trend in reading, adopting a style of teaching called "whole language" in the 1980s.