America’s children can’t read: readoption of phonics might be a solution
By SABRINA FIGUEROA — sfigueroaavila@ucdavis.edu
We can’t ignore that the current level of literacy within the United States — especially among the younger generations — is inadequate. In 2024, the Nation’s Report Card found that 40% of fourth graders and 33% of eighth graders scored below their specified reading levels, each two points lower than the scores in 2022 and five points lower than the in 2019. In California alone, 54% of fourth graders and 52% of eighth graders failed to meet their reading standards on state testing exams from the 2024-2025 school year.
While recent low reading scores have been credited to the COVID-19 pandemic, these results have been present for the past two decades — especially among Black and Latino students — indicating that there’s something much deeper at play.
The loss of instruction through phonics, a method of reading and writing that focuses on the relationships between letters and sounds, is currently the key reason as to why reading levels are so low. This technique lost popularity in the U.S. by the 1980s, as the “whole language” model became more prominent in schools. The whole language model’s focus is on the memorization of words, encouraging students to use context clues to infer their meanings. This strategy, unlike the phonic methods, fails to create a good foundation for learning new words and how to speak and spell.
The question of which method should be used has been highly debated across the country and dubbed “The Reading Wars.” This topic sparked further conversation this year, as AB 1454 — a California bill encouraging state schools to adopt more phonic-focused reading curricula and guaranteeing increased funding for the transition — was passed and approved by Governor Gavin Newsom.
Many proponents of the bill based their arguments on research that students learn to read much better when they know the phonological aspects of letters. Conversely, using the “whole language” model creates a guessing-game that doesn’t help students when they encounter a new word they’ve never seen before, causing them to fall behind in other subjects beyond language arts, like math, science and history. As kids move on to higher levels of learning, educational content becomes more complex. If they don’t have the skills to comprehend written language outside of what they’ve memorized, learning more demanding skills like critical thinking, problem-solving, essay-writing and data interpretation become even more difficult; language is used to communicate all types of intelligence.
Before the bill guaranteed funding, opponents of the bill, such as the California Teachers Association (CTA), mainly argued that transitioning over to a new literacy framework would be too expensive and that it would disregard the needs of English learners. Members of the CTA argued that “reading programs that are heavily focused on phonics are too narrow and confusing for students who struggle with English, especially if they can’t understand what they’re reading,” according to an article by CalMatters.
Learning to read English relies on more than just understanding what words mean. Each language will have its own set of phonemes, so learning English phonetics still has value to non-English speakers when they are constantly encountering words that they will not only read, but write and speak.
As someone who was an English Language Development (ELD) student until the fifth grade, learning phonics was crucial to my English fluency. It set up a foundation to learn everything else about the English language, including meaning and context. This debate should not be about picking a side — phonics-only or whole language-only — it’s about finding a balance between phonics, semantics and comprehension of larger texts.
Though the research, or “the science of reading,” in which this bill has been based will always be debated, refuted and improved upon, it doesn’t mean the current system should resist change. The government has funded studies that show the positive impact of phonics on reading for decades, yet action to improve the actual system has been scarce. Clearly, the long pattern of low reading scores signifies that we must revise the way we teach kids how to read, and we shouldn’t wait it out any longer. Children completing their education continue to suffer the costs while we continue to stand still.
Literacy is crucial for learning and navigating the immense amount of information — some fabricated or manipulated — that we are exposed to. Reading is important for the overall development and education of future generations, including lowering rates of incarceration and poverty. This is not simply an education debate; it has nuance and disparities based on class, race and ethnicity, making it a civil rights issue too.
This new legislation won’t mandate phonic-based curricula all over the state, but it will encourage it. Other states like Mississippi and Louisiana have been able to successfully implement and mandate this kind of curriculum. As a result, they have seen improvements in their reading scores, which alone is reason enough to be excited for this effort.
Still, the work is not over. Let this serve as a wakeup call for everyone in the U.S. — if we want to make a better future for our children, it’s time we start focusing on the fundamental issues within their education. Literacy is an important skill not just for academia, but for navigating our world at large. As our political climate becomes increasingly complicated to parse, these basic skills likewise become paramount. This is bigger than elementary education — it affects the integrity of our society as a whole, and we need to treat it as such.
Written by: Sabrina Figueroa — sfigueroaavila@ucdavis.edu
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