This article was written by Martin Slagter and published by the74 on December 11th, 2025.

This article is part of Bright Spots, a series highlighting schools where every child learns to read, no matter their zip code. Explore the Bright Spots map to find out which schools are beating the odds in terms of literacy versus poverty rates.

The students in Emily Hoard’s first-grade class trace letters in their sand trays, then break down the sounds the letters make in simple words. This is what the science of reading looks like as Hoard and her fellow teachers at Stockbridge Community Schools in Michigan go all-in on their new approach to literacy instruction.

“The kids know exactly what to expect, and they’re so much more confident when they come to a word that they don’t know, or a big word in text, because they’ve been taught all of those little, tiny skills that they need, and the concepts of how words are made up,” Hoard said, who teaches at Emma L. Smith Elementary. “It’s not like a guessing game for them anymore.”

A small mid-Michigan district of 1,075 students, Stockbridge is among the first districts in the state to fully embrace training its teachers and building a curriculum that is supported by the science of reading, a body of research explaining how children develop reading and writing skills. This instruction relies heavily on phonics in the early years of schooling before building other essential skills like fluency, vocabulary, comprehension and the syntax of grammar and sentence structure in the later elementary grades.

After the district’s teachers and literacy coaches received training on how to implement the curriculum, they built a new foundation to teaching literacy that helped third-grade students increase English proficiency by 12% on standardized tests.

Now in its second year of structured literacy strategies, including daily small group and one-on-one literacy interventions and games that are scored with data tracked in real time, Stockbridge Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction Amy Hodgson said the new approach has worked so well, the district has implemented a similar teaching method in math through daily, classwide interventions.

Building those skills in the younger grades will help them have success across subjects as they get older, she said.

“If students don’t have fluency and automaticity in math or reading, it’s very difficult for them to have the cognitive load to access the higher skills that are being demanded of them in life and in standardized testing and in all these other places,” Hodgson said. “If I’m asked to do calculus, or if I’m asked to read a complex text, and I’m still sounding out words, there’s an exhaustion that comes with that.”

A shifting focus to phonics

The school district is part of a recent nationwide shift back toward phonics-focused curricula and structured literacy rather than a balanced literacy approach that incorporates a “whole language” method focused on meaning and context of words.

While the two approaches should be seen in some respects as complementary and integrated, Harvard Professor of Cognition and Education Catherine Snow said they are typically pitted against each other, with schools choosing to change approaches when a new “literacy crisis” emerges.

“It’s kind of a pendulum shift every 15 or 20 years that you get some report saying our kids can’t read, and whatever is the dominant procedure at the time gets suppressed in favor of the other one, but in both cases, they go too far with it,” said Snow, an expert on language and literacy development in children.

“You can’t just do code-focused instruction, because you will drive the kids crazy and you will teach them that reading is about pronouncing words correctly, not about meaning. You can’t just do whole language instruction, because many kids need a little bit of help getting into the system. They need someone to explain to them very systematically.”

Along with 39 other states across the country, Michigan has embraced the science of reading, a buzz term that is neither a program nor an instructional approach, said Kim St. Martin, director of the Michigan Multi-Tiered System of Supports Technical Assistance Center and consultant to the Michigan Department of Education. Instead, it is a body of research schools can choose to build their curriculum, training and assessments around, she said.

In 2024, Michigan passed a pair of K-12 literacy laws aligned with this research in an effort to boost third-grade reading scores and better identify and support students with dyslexia. In addition to aligning its curricula and assessments with lists approved by the state’s Department of Education, one law notes that instruction must not include methods or curricula that emphasize memorizing words or prompt students to guess unknown words using pictures.

Commonly used within whole language and balanced literacy programs, this “three-cueing” system model relies on word meaning and sentence context; as such, it does not serve students well in learning the foundations of reading and writing, St. Martin said.

“If I’m a second-grader, when I’m reading the words, there’s nothing wrong with me having pictures in text for the purpose of me getting a visual representation in my mind of understanding what it is that this text is about,” St. Martin said. “What is inappropriate is if I’m using the picture to try to decode the word, because that would prevent me from understanding how to put together the letter-sound combinations to read that word.

“Unfortunately, there have been strategies that have been taught for several years that frankly, are causing kids to guess and to use those types of three-cueing strategies.”

Michigan has committed $87 million toward creating a committee that will vet curricula aligned with the science of reading and allow schools to purchase materials approved by the committee. The state also provided $34 million to train elementary teachers on how to teach the curricula via Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS), with more than 5,000 teachers and literacy coaches completing the training to date.

The laws and funding efforts are concentrated on providing teachers with the tools they need to teach all aspects of reading to young learners, Michigan Department of Education Literacy Unit Manager DeNesha Rawls-Smith said.

“We believe that it is foundational for students that are learning to read to decode unknown words,” Rawls-Smith said. “But again, we don’t believe that phonics, or word recognition in and of itself, makes a good reader. We believe that a good reader has the ability to recognize unknown words, and they have a knowledge about language. So together with word recognition and language comprehension, you have a reader that can read and understand what they’re reading.”

How a child learns best

After studying years of student achievement data, Stockbridge K-6 Literacy Coach Cindy Stacy learned the school was doing the same thing and getting the same results that were “not amazing.”

The district used state grant funds to invest in the Orton Gillingham curriculum, an approach initially developed to support students with dyslexia which has proven successful with other students as well. It worked with Institute for Multi-Sensory Education instructors to train its teachers and literacy coaches.

“Prior to this latest shift, most elementary education programs focused on balanced literacy,” Stacy said. “There was a small piece of phonics. There was a whole language approach. There were leveled readers. With the science of reading, the whole paradigm just shifted.”

While laying the initial groundwork was difficult, Stacy said mornings at Smith Elementary are now more intentional and bustling, with students reaching for their “OG bags” that allow them to trace letters into their own sand trays.

In Michelle Hedding’s kindergarten class, students are asked what sound letters make before tracing the letter in the sand tray. Different three-letter combinations are broken down by individual letters on a TV monitor, with Hedding asking students to pronounce the word before ultimately asking them if they’re “real or nonsense” words.

In grades K-5, students receive at least 90 minutes of reading and 20 minutes of writing instruction per day, Stacy said, with several who need more individual support pulled into small group or one-on-one intervention periods for 25-30 minutes. In grades 3 to 5, there is more focus on language and reading comprehension, vocabulary, background knowledge and verbal reasoning.

During intervention periods, literacy interventionist Amy Taylor will drill down on concepts like the sounds that different blends of letters make and how a “magic” e at the end of a word like face or home makes the preceding vowel in the word “say its name.”

Taylor, who has been with the district for 20 years, said the transition was difficult due to the belief from some teachers and staff that the use of sight words, or commonly used words children can memorize from sight, was an effective way to teach all students.

“My kindergarten class at the time, they were learning how to read — but the difference was, they didn’t know why,” Taylor said. “It was all memorization. They did not peel a word apart and talk about the different whys: why the word is ‘pinch.’ So, when we started the [new curricula], that was life changing for our learners and for us.… It’s just changed our whole way of looking at a child and how they learn best.”