🚨 Think our kids are learning to read the same way we did? Think again.

I recently tuned into a podcast that had my head spinning. Sold a Story digs into how kids in America are really being taught to read 📖 and it’s a doozy of an expose.  

Think back to how you learned. Chances are it was the “old-school way”: sounding out letters, stringing them together, forming words. 🔠 That’s phonics — and it’s how humans have been learning to read for ages.

Except… not so much.

In Glen Rock, like many schools across the country, our elementary schools have leaned on a method from Fountas & Pinnell called “balanced literacy.”  Instead of sounding out every letter, kids are nudged to guess the word based on clues: look at the picture, peek at the first letter, or predict from the sentence. “Balanced literacy” has been a dominant reading approach in U.S. classrooms for at least the past two decades - but it has failed to deliver. The approach has even been banned 🚫 in certain states. National reading scores have declined. In 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reported only one-third of 4th and 8th graders were reading at or above proficiency levels. 

Kids may look like they’re reading, but they’re sort of guessing. 🤔 They never build the strong decoding muscles they need. And once homework ramps up in middle and high school, students really start to suffer because - well, if you can’t read fluently, every class gets harder. 

We need only look at real experiences within our own district. I know a Glen Rock family whose daughter was labeled “reading disabled” a few years ago when she was in 3rd grade. She couldn’t keep up in class with reading. She was given an IEP and was pulled for support. But a district reading specialist taught her using a phonics-based approach and within a couple years the “disability” vanished. The issue wasn’t the child — it was the method.

At the core, the way kids are taught matters.

In 2024, New Jersey passed a law requiring schools to adopt evidence-based literacy practices starting in the 2025–26 school year. Glen Rock has already begun moving toward the Orton-Gillingham (OG) approach—linking sounds to letters and building words step by step. In other words- hooray 🥳- phonics is back. But Fountas & Pinnell hasn’t fully left the scene; while no longer the dominant method, it’s still lingering in classrooms.

If elected, I’d push for continuous data 📊 on our literacy results and advocate for retiring Fountas & Pinnell altogether. And on a bigger scale - look to make sure all our curriculum is based upon evidence based learning methods. This shift underscores an important lesson: Glen Rock should not wait for state mandates to drive change. Instead, we should proactively monitor curriculum choices, track student progress and ensure teachers receive latest training in evidence-based practices and invest our school dollars in effective classroom materials. Let’s give our kids the solid foundation they deserve.

▶️ Podcasts: 

🎙️ Why 65% of Fourth Graders Can’t Really Read - Bari Weiss

🎙️ Sold a Story - Emily Hanford

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