In Bridge Michigan op-ed Dean Elizabeth Birr Moje and Patrick Cooney explain why students need more than phonics instruction to become great readers

In an op-ed for Bridge Michigan, Dean Elizabeth Birr Moje and Patrick Cooney of Michigan Future Inc. address the claims that too many Michigan fourth-graders can’t read well, and that the state should follow Mississippi’s example to improve their reading scores.

The co-authors explain that Mississippi’s reading scores did improve dramatically over the past decade when a phonics-focused curriculum was taught to elementary students. However, the same students who showed early gains did not continue to improve as readers later on in their academic careers. Under Mississippie’s new literacy plan, nearly 3 in 4 still weren’t ready for college-level reading at the end of high school.

“Reading is about much more than just sounding out words,” write Moje and Cooney. “To be a good reader means being able to analyze ideas, connect evidence and make meaning of text. Strong reading requires strategies to persist when a text is challenging. Excellent reading demands that readers ask questions of texts. These higher-level skills are not taught through phonics alone. That’s why improving early decoding isn’t enough to prepare kids for real-world reading and writing. And it is not enough to leave high school college- and career-ready.”  

By focusing only on test-driven word-level drills, Michigan’s students might read words, warn the authors, but they won’t always understand or create meaning from them.