AEI says science-of-reading stuck
- Robert Pondiscio used a May 1 Fordham column to argue science-of-reading policy wins have not yet fully changed K–3 classroom practice. - The piece leans on a fall 2025 RAND teacher survey showing progress, but says only about half of teachers describe instruction as fully structured. - That matters because 40-plus states now have reading laws, and the real bottleneck has shifted from legislation to implementation.
Reading instruction is in a weird middle phase right now. The big fight over whether phonics and explicit decoding matter is mostly over. States have passed laws, districts have bought new materials, and teachers are getting retrained. But the hard part is not winning an argument on paper. The hard part is changing what happens in a classroom at 9:10 a.m. when a child gets stuck on a word. ### What is the actual news here? The immediate hook is a May 1 column by Robert Pondiscio at Fordham, picking up a question that AEI and other reform groups have been pressing for months: if science of reading has won in policy, has it actually won in practice? His answer is basically no — or at least, not yet. The shift is real, but incomplete, and the classroom is now the problem to solve. ### What does “science of reading” mean here? It is not one curriculum. It is a body of research about how children learn to read — especially the importance of decoding, phonemic awareness, systematic phonics, language comprehension, and explicit instruction. That sounds obvious now, but for years many schools finding them out. ### So haven’t states already acted? Yes — aggressively. Stanford noted in February that at least 40 states have introduced science-of-reading legislation. Those laws often cover teacher licensure, approved curricula, screening rules, and intervention requirements. ExcelinEd’s 2026 scan shows how broad the policy architecture has become, from dyslexia screening to parent notification to summer reading programs. ### Then why isn’t that enough? Because teaching is not a light switch. Pondiscio and Kristen McQuillan made this point in an AEI essay last November: policy can force adoption, but it cannot make practice skillful. A teacher can attend training, get a new curriculum, and still fall back on old habits during small-group routines they'd used for years in a different method. ### What evidence says the shift is incomplete? Pondiscio points to a Fordham report built from the RAND American Teacher Panel in fall 2025. The survey found real movement — more teachers favor phonics over cueing, and programs like UFLI and CKLA are
