ASHEVILLE (January 23, 2025) – When Carson Bridges entered the classroom, she unknowingly joined a long-running fight about how to teach children to read.
For decades, most elementary schools across the country, as well as colleges that train aspiring educators, followed a method called “balanced literacy.” The practice de-emphasizes phonics instruction, or lessons on the connection between individual letters and their sounds, in favor of using context clues to comprehend words. Instead of sounding out a word, students are told to use pictures, sentence structure, the first few letters of a word, or other words they already know to determine the meaning.
But since the 1990s, scholars and policymakers increasingly argued that method didn’t work. Test scores show only a third of the nation’s fourth-graders read at a proficient level, and that number has been stubbornly static for decades. North Carolina’s scores track the average. Advocates of what’s now called the “science of reading” say systematic instruction in phonics is necessary to teach budding readers to decode longer and more complex words.
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