Summary Of School Is For Learning To Read By Emily Hanford

Reading is an important skill that helps pave the way to success. From a young age, children are taught this valuable skill and for the most part, schools aid in this. Emily Hanford, a senior education correspondent for American Public Media, writes an article called “Education in America: School is for Learning to Read” where she advocates for schools to make a change in how they are teaching children to read. Daniel Thomas Moran writes an article, “It is Literally about Literacy” where he points out the importance of reading and advises students to develop this skill. Bringing awareness to illiteracy as well as the problems people face can be achieved in numerous ways.

Hanford reports about an incident that occurred to Corinne Adams,

Adams recalls when her son was being taught to read over Zoom: “In kindergarten and again in first grade, her son and his classmates were taught that when they came to a word they didn’t know, they should look at the first letter, look at the picture in the book and think of a word that would make sense. They weren’t told to sound out the word”(Hanford 1). It is evident that this method of teaching was ineffective as it does not teach children how to sound out a word for them to read and understand it. Hanford uses research that demonstrates how schools have not been effective in teaching children how to read, which is a crucial skill to learn. Hanford states, “In a 2019 survey by Education Week, 72 percent of elementary special education and K-2 teachers said their schools used balanced literacy”(1). But the research found that it was more difficult for children to learn to read than one might imagine. Balanced literacy has been

These programs offer tutoring and practices to underprepared students, which will help improve reading skills using textbooks, workbooks, and online activities (Garcia- Navarrete et al. 76). An example of this is “OUR READING TOOLBOX”, a thinking-centered intervention at a California community college that teaches developmental reading. The results of this were positive and many students showed improvement in their reading ability, specifically: “Students expressed how their ability to read was affected by this experience using OUR READING TOOLBOX with comments, such as “It made me a better reader by learning techniques that are useful to break down the readings and understand them completely.”’(Garcia- Navarrete et al. 76). Having access to these reading and comprehension tools that allowed students to engage with and evaluate the given reading material has helped them improve their reading skills. These practices and methods should be implemented in schools as a way to help students learn or develop their literary