Corrected: This story has been updated to note that the cancellation of contracts to develop U.S. Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse practice guides affected at least two guides that would have focused on reading instruction.
The U.S. Department of Education has signaled that reading instruction will be a priority under President Donald Trump’s administration—placing literacy squarely on its agenda amid an ongoing national “science of reading” movement.
On May 20, the agency identified “evidence-based literacy instruction” as one of three proposed priorities for grant funding, stating that “it is time for the United States to refocus its education investments on the most essential skills a student can acquire.”
During a budget hearing later that week, U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon discussed the teaching of reading, calling for a “return to basics.”
“If you cannot read, you cannot learn,” she said. “And that is one of the reasons I believe sincerely that we have seen such decreases or failure in our schools, because we are not teaching our children to read.”
The message comes as researchers, advocates, and state policymakers have pushed schools to align early-reading instruction to what the evidence shows works to improve students’ skills. More than half of states have passed legislation related to evidence-based reading instruction since 2019.
“Who isn’t in favor of evidence-based literacy instruction?” said Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “That should be an unambiguously good thing, regardless of where you are on the political spectrum.”
Still, the agency’s announcement has been met with a mixed reception from some advocates and researchers in the science of reading community. For one, they’re concerned that calling for schools to go “back to basics” oversimplifies the complex research base about what’s necessary for a comprehensive approach to literacy instruction.
And, they point out, projects to collect and translate this research—such as the federally funded practice guides the agency highlighted in its notice of grant priorities—are under threat from this administration.
Widespread cuts to federal contracts canceled several planned guides, at least two of which would have addressed reading instruction, which are published through the What Works Clearinghouse. And researchers have warned that staff reductions at the agency’s Institute for Education Sciences could stymie research efforts into best practices in the subject.
“If [the practice guides are] a standard for determining which practices should be supported, funded, and implemented, legislators must continue funding reading science,” said Kari Kurto, the national science of reading project director at the Reading League, an organization that promotes science-based reading instruction, in an email.
“It will be essential to reinstate funding that has been taken away from current reading research, continued IES work, and REL centers,” she said, referencing the Education Department’s scaled-down research wing and closed technical-assistance centers, “which help schools and districts understand how best to implement these evidence-aligned practices that are being named as a top priority.”
The federal role in reading has waxed and waned
While decisions about reading curriculum and instructional methods are made at the state and local levels, the federal government’s role in the subject has waxed and waned over the last three decades.
The early 2000s was the era of Reading First, an initiative of former President George W. Bush’s Education Department that incentivized schools to provide teacher training and adopt curricula aligned with “scientifically based reading research.” The program improved students’ phonics skills but not their overall reading comprehension, and it was plagued by accusations of financial mismanagement. Those centered on claims that the department steered states toward particular programs and assessments.
More recently, the agency took a less prescriptive approach. In the 2010s, competitive grants offered states funding for “comprehensive literacy.” A 2024 program evaluation found that literacy programs with rigorous research backing were “not a focus” of states’ efforts.
“The federal role in reading, it’s not been a great track record,” said Susan Neuman, a professor of childhood and literacy education at New York University who was an education official under Bush and was engaged in the implementation of Reading First.
In part, she said, that’s because it’s hard to define what should count as “evidence-based.”
The current grant priority defines it as “literacy instruction that relates to explicit, systematic, and intentional instruction in phonological awareness, phonic decoding, vocabulary, language structure, reading fluency, and reading comprehension; promotes knowledge-rich materials” and is backed by either strong or moderate research evidence.
The first part of this definition “sounds very much like another form of the National Reading Panel,” said Neuman, referencing the federally commissioned 2000 report that synthesized the research on five components of reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.
Reading First programs had to address these topics. The “big five,” as they’ve come to be known, are also usually listed in more recent state laws about reading instruction.
This is a “standard” list and “a reasonable set of things to start with,” said Mark Seidenberg, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the cognitive and neurological bases of reading.
But it doesn’t refer to other components that should be part of a definition of “evidence-based,” like ensuring that reading programs and techniques can meet a diversity of student needs—such as offering targeted support for English learners, Seidenberg said.
The structure of the definition—a list of discrete components—has the potential to steer schools in the wrong direction, said Neuman. It gives the impression that each aspect of reading has to be addressed individually, rather than incorporating them together thoughtfully in a comprehensive program.
“It’s the same problem we saw with Reading First,” she said. “What it created was districts creating buckets—now it’s time for basics or now it’s time for vocabulary—which rarely got attention—or comprehension, which rarely got attention.”
This concern is “absolutely on the department’s radar,” said a department official who spoke on background, adding that the field now has a more sophisticated understanding of how to incorporate different components of reading instruction into a coherent program. “I do think we are in a slightly different place than we were in Reading First. We’ve had 20 years of learning,” the official said.
What does ‘back to basics’ mean?
Still, McMahon has emphasized foundational skills. In her comments at last week’s budget hearing, she said the science of reading is “getting back to phonetics and teaching the way that students learn to read better in the beginning.”
Decades of research has shown that it is important to teach young children how letters represent sounds and how to use that knowledge to read words—the foundational skills of reading. But research also shows that those skills are far from the only instruction that students need to become strong readers.
“We have seen that just giving students a great deal of time on phonics is not going to be the answer to achievement,” said Neuman. “We are going to see the initial bump, but then we are going to see that students have that 4th grade slump.”
In response to a question about the “Mississippi miracle”—the steep rise in 4th grade reading scores in the state that followed large-scale changes in curriculum, intervention, and teacher training—McMahon said, “What they did was return to basics.”
But Kristen Wynn, a former literacy director at the Mississippi education department, said the approach was “more than just phonics.”
“At the center of this strategy is prevention and intervention,” said Wynn, who is now the head of the AIM Institute for Learning and Research, an education consulting organization that provides reading professional development. Developing a system to identify and prioritize students most at risk for reading difficulty was essential, said Wynn, as was investing deeply in teacher training.
The federal Education Department official said that an exclusive focus on phonics “is not what we mean by back to basics.” Instead, the official said, the phrase refers to a prioritization of core academic subjects, rather than other tasks teachers are “burdened” with in schools.
Reading vs. DEI is a false dichotomy, some say
McMahon has positioned focusing on reading “basics” as a corrective to perceived ideological bias in curricula.
Discretionary grants will now be focused on “meaningful learning,” not “divisive ideologies and unproven strategies,” she said, in a statement.
Many researchers and educators, though, say that pitting explicit foundational skills instruction against attention to diversity in the classroom is a false dichotomy.
“Students come to our schools from different backgrounds, and so to engage them in the reading process, you’re of course going to use systematic reading instruction, but you would engage them more if they were able to know that their language and their culture were valued,” said Ramona Pittman, an associate professor in the department of Teaching, Learning, and Culture at Texas A&M University.
Pittman studies African American English and literacy. Her work provides a concrete example of how attention to students’ racial and linguistic backgrounds is directly related to foundational reading instruction.
“There is a language mismatch between the language that is spoken by African American students and the language they’re expected to speak at school,” she said. “The teacher has to recognize that difference between the two; otherwise, the teacher can look at those students as having a deficit.”
Acknowledging students’ language backgrounds is “absolutely part of this work and making sure that you’re meeting students where they are,” said the department official.
More broadly, though, attacks on attempts to deepen culturally responsive teaching practices are antithetical to evidence-based approaches to literacy instruction, said Zaretta Hammond, an education consultant and the author of the forthcoming book Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power: Teaching for Instructional Equity and Cognitive Justice.
“I’m all for evidence-based literacy. … When we understand that reading—literacy overall, reading and writing—was used to actually keep the playing field unlevel during segregation, then our focus on reading and making sure every student is a powerful reader and writer is really key,” she said.
“But it’s not an either or situation the way they’re setting it up. In order to have an effective evidence-based literacy approach that actually makes learning sticky for the student, … I need to use techniques that help them process that information, that build their capacity, that leverage what they already know.”
That’s what culturally responsive teaching is, Hammond said.
It’s not just that this kind of teaching can coexist with, or motivate students to engage in, evidence-based literacy instruction, she added. “It is part of the evidence of making the science of learning operational.”
