The number of Louisiana kindergarteners reading at or above grade level doubled during the 2024-25 school year, Louisiana Department of Education officials reported Thursday. 

That data comes from the state’s early literacy screener — a test to measure whether kindergarten through third/grade students are reading at grade level. 

“We’re extremely thrilled,” said Danny Bosch, the director of advocacy at The Center for Literacy and Learning. “We’re very excited we’re going back to evidence-based instruction. We know phonics works.”

Armed by scientific studies, reading experts like Bosch are supporting a resurgence of phonics, which helps children learn to read by sounding-out words, in a way well-known to older generations.

Future student success — and stumbles — hinge on early literacy. Students who do not read proficiently by the end of fourth grade are four times more likely to drop out of school, research shows. Nationally, there has been a renewed focus on reading in early grades, because as students age, their struggles to read can cascade into other subjects — all of which depend on the ability to read and write. 

Even the lowest scores within Louisiana’s newest results point to the importance of face-to-face phonics learning. Nearly 40% of Louisiana third-graders failed to read on grade level. But the pandemic struck during those students’ early-literacy years — pre-k and kindergarten, forcing them to Zoom and its sometimes-frozen screens to differentiate subtle differences between phonemic sounds, in words like cat, hat, and that.

Younger Louisiana children are doing better, because they entered school after the return to in-person learning— and because state curriculum recently shifted to a focus on fundamental reading skills, including phonics.

Last fall, only 28% of Louisiana kindergarteners read at or above grade level. But as they finished the year, this spring, 61% of kindergarteners reached that mark. 

The state numbers didn’t surprise Camille Russ, the Chief Academic Officer at Plessy Community Schools. Plessy has used a “science of reading” curriculum for years, she said.

“I’m excited by the Louisiana data and it aligns to what we’ve seen as a school,” Russ said. 

Many New Orleans charters began using the science of reading curriculum, which is heavily rooted in phonics, ahead of state law, which required that all schools create plans by June 2023 to teach the specifics of “foundational literacy,” including phonics.  Phonics is the teaching of the sounds that letters, or groups of letters, make and how sounds combine to form words. 

The trends in kindergarten were also seen in higher grades.

In the fall of 2024, just over 50% of Louisiana students in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade were reading at or above their respective reading levels. All grew this year, with the largest growth seen in first grade, where 69% of students were reading at or above grade level by end of year.

Those numbers are improving, officials say, because of the renewed focus on phonics — which had been cast aside over the last generation. 

The shift away from phonics

As an English teacher in New York in the early 2000s, Russ saw high school students struggle to read children’s books. To her, the students’ low literacy level could be explained by the absence of phonics. Her students had not received the same phonics instruction she did as a student in the 1980s. 

Over the subsequent generation, authors and reading strategists had sold curriculums that ignored cognitive science. Reporter Emily Hanford traces the large swing in her ongoing investigative reporting on reading curriculum, “Sold a Story.”

Phonics instruction was cast aside for a “whole language approach” that focused on memorizing words and using context clues to read. 

“It was more aligned to the work of Lucy Calkins,” Russ said, naming a prominent curriculum author who prioritized recognition and memorization of “sight words” and their meanings. Children should be exposed to books that interest them, fostering a love of reading, Calkins believed. The thinking was that “exposure to books and language was enough to teach children to read without explicit phonics instruction,” Russ said.

That wasn’t enough, reading experts contended. In 1997, the U.S. Congress charged the National Reading Panel to cull through research and determine the best way to teach children to read. The panel’s 2000 report found that science was definitively on the side of phonics, not simply the “holistic, meaning-centered approaches” that had been in vogue.

“It’s the added layer of explicit phonics instruction that’s critical,” Russ said.

Louisiana reforms

The state’s return to phonics is responsible for recent gains in reading, educators say.

Thanks in large part to the boost in phonics, Louisiana’s fourth graders boasted “historic progress” in national academic assessments last year.

The state’s push toward phonics-based instruction gained steam when schools were shuttered during the pandemic, said Danny Bosch, the director of advocacy at The Center for Literacy and Learning, which advocates for a proven literacy curriculum and other reading supports for students.

Still, it took time for the school curriculums to shift back. Curriculums come at a high expense for school districts, which typically invest in curriculum for several years at a time. 

Independent charter schools, which have the freedom to select their own curriculum and hire staff, were able to return to phonics more quickly. That includes Plessy Community School, which began using a phonics-centered curriculum even before Russ arrived in 2020.

Just as the pandemic set in, in 2020, Louisiana had started a kindergarten through second-grade literacy pilot program. Several New Orleans charter schools participated. 

Among Louisiana’s supporters of phonics is Richard Nelson, then a state representative from Mandeville. “(Nelson) really became aware of it because during COVID his kids were learning at home, and he was shocked to find that phonics was not part of the curriculum,” Bosch said. 

Nelson had heard about academic growth in neighboring Mississippi when the state instituted a laser-focus on literacy. But that growth wasn’t happening here. So Nelson led a shift toward phonics on a bill in Louisiana, which was signed into law as Act 422 last year.   

Now, everyone seems to be getting on board with phonics. In 2021, the state also began requiring that teachers undergo professional development for early literacy specifically. Some teaching colleges are adding the training into their requirements for teaching degrees.

During the pandemic, federal COVID-19 schools money helped expand reading tutoring in some local schools. Sabrina Pence, the CEO of Firstline Charter Schools said the charter group was able to expand their reading intervention services with those federal dollars. 

This year, the federal pandemic funding is ending. Schools that have built up reading support programs had planned to keep them, school leaders said — but now worry that cuts are possible, given the NOLA Public Schools‘ district-wide budget shortfall.

Attention to reading varies by grade

In the past, special instruction for reading largely focused on high-stakes accountability grades — the third through eighth-grade students who are tested yearly. Those students’ test scores are the largest factor in the state-assigned A through F letter grade schools receive each year.

Kindergarten, first and second graders didn’t receive the same attention because their scores didn’t count. In fact, one charter network offered larger bonuses for improvements in grades where students took standardized tests. A fourth-grade teacher whose students improved got a $43,000 bonus, calculated based on her salary. But a teacher who had even higher growth in her kindergarteners, whose test scores don’t count toward state ratings, had her bonus capped at just over $4,000. 

This is the first year all public elementary schools in Louisiana administered the same screening test, said DeJunne’ Clark Jackson, the president of The Center for Literacy and Learning. That standardization will allow the center to better study school programs in this traditionally low-achieving state and others.

Within the center’s most recent analysis, it’s clear that kindergarten, first and second graders have similar academic experiences amid the pandemic. “You’re looking at a group of students who were primarily at home in that third-grade band,” Jackson said. 

In 2018, the state did away with its high-stakes fourth grade testing, which had required that  any fourth grader who did not pass the state’s standardized LEAP exam must repeat the grade. Then this year, the state enacted a retention law for third-grade students. 

Under the new legislation, sponsored by Nelson, students must repeat the third-grade if they read well below grade level. (For a student to move to fourth grade, there are a number of “good cause” exceptions, such for those diagnosed with dyslexia or for students already receiving intensive help.) 

But with improved instruction, wraparound tutoring and parent education, educators are hopeful that, in the future, fewer students will be held back by the new law. “We have all these systems in place. We support the ecosystem of literacy that is a complete wraparound service,” Jackson said. “We’ve got to keep it going.”