Has California turned the page on its reading crisis?

For years California has faced a literacy crisis, with less than half of thirdand fourth-graders reading at grade level in the 2093-24 school year and the state often trailing national reading achievement.

- Molly Gibbs, Tribune News Service

Even before the coronavirus pandemic stalled learning, California students struggled to meet reading expectations. Recent state and national testing data shows they have been slow to regain ground lost during the pandemic. The gap between socioeconomically disadvantaged students and their more affluent peers is wider than ever, and the second largest in the nation. Now, though, with Gov. Gavin Newsom pledging to include $200 million in funding for evidence-based literacy instruction in the state budget and California schools preparing for the first time this year to screen every student in kindergarten through second grade for reading challenges, educators and literacy advocates are hopeful the state will finally turn a page in the decades-long struggle.

But how did we get here? And why does California struggle more than most states with getting students up to reading standards? The best way to teach kids how to read has been widely debated in the Golden State, and educators and literacy advocates have said some students are capable of masking their reading struggles because of the way schools have taught reading for decades — a technique referred to as “balanced! literacy.

Using a blend of whole language and phonics, balanced literacy focuses on teaching students to memorize sight words and use context and picture cues to understand a word's meaning. Kim Tran, a K-5th-grade reading specialist and partner with the UC Berkeley California and Literature Reading Project, called it a “guessing game” where students look at the first letter and last letter of a word they don't know and try to guess the rest. “That's just kind of muddling through it and hoping there's enough pictures or context for you to understand what's happening,” she said.