Written by Paula White, JerseyCAN Executive Director for NJ.com

The brilliant American poet Langston Hughes once asked, “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up Like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore — And then run?”

Unfortunately for parents, students and education advocates in New Jersey, we must wait to find out the answer to this question.

New Jersey’s Department of Education is dragging its heels on a full release of student achievement data in reading and math, and likely won’t do so for several more weeks. The missing data is aligned with New Jersey’s Student Learning Standards (NJSLS), which tell us what our students should have learned at each grade level. Knowing where things stand is important.

If the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 4th grade reading results are a foreshadowing of how students in our state have fared, young people’s dreams are being woefully deferred, with Black and brown children as prime casualties. This must stop.

Now is the time to disrupt “business as usual” in literacy instruction in New Jersey.

Children’s reading skills matter across the curriculum. Without being able to read well, promising math gains in the early grades will stagnate or decline and advanced content in science and other major disciplines will be out of reach. We can start addressing this by publishing and analyzing student reading data and adopting a strong, statewide reading instruction approach.

The pandemic’s toll has been harsh on both educators and students but student data still matters. New Jersey is often ranked as the No. 1 state in K-12 education, it may surprise you that in 2019, NAEP results showed Mississippi’s Hispanic 4th graders outpacing New Jersey’s Hispanic 4th graders in reading by 8 points (221-213). Student assessment information can resist being punitive while challenging assumptions that may be a hindrance to helping more children learn.

Learning loss is expected after a global pandemic, but the 2022 NAEP results show the loss has been troublingly uneven. The lowest-achieving students had more precipitous learning setbacks than those achieving higher levels before the pandemic. With this in mind, we cannot support taking a standoffish, eclectic, or faddish approach to teaching students to read instead of using a steadfast evidence-based way to do so.

Lucy Calkins’ reading curriculum influenced literacy acquisition for millions of children. However, it has fallen out of favor for significantly downplaying phonics instruction, a reminder that without discreet guidance or guardrails from the state, thousands of educators have been directed by their school systems to follow programs with scant or mixed research to the end of the reading cliff. In contrast, thousands of students – as evidenced by their outcomes – have been driven to the brink of learning demise.

Let’s be clear, no discovery beckons us to teach and support reading instruction in a new way. We must simply adhere to instructional methods that have already led scores of students to read well. More than two dozen states agree, including Mississippi, Connecticut and Pennsylvania.

They have all adopted policies or laws that govern how students are taught to read. In the District of Columbia, schools must use programs based on the science of reading and they must support educators with aligned professional development. Pending legislation in Delaware would require schools to adopt approved curricula. Also, in-service and preservice elementary school teachers would have to be trained in evidence-based reading instruction.

I have firsthand knowledge of the impact of these strategies. When learning the foundations of reading instruction at Spelman College, I had to show mastery of phonics and phonemic awareness assessment.

Among many other technical facts, I learned that while the English alphabet has 26 letters, the language has at least 44 phonemes or distinct units of sound. My professor, Christine King Farris, sister of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and a staunch advocate for good teaching allowed students in her teacher preparation programs to retake the phonics test multiple times to achieve mastery so that we would be prepared to teach using the best practices to help children decode the language needed to succeed in school and life.

As Mississippi and other states have shown, reading outcomes can improve with the right approach. To accelerate such learning, we will be best served with state-specific data on how our children have fared, and by acknowledging that teaching, like all other professions, requires specialized knowledge and the intentional application of that knowledge. This is an inarguable imperative for reading instruction and we must act on it urgently for our kids.