Learning to read is one of the most difficult cognitive achievements people ever have in their lives, yet children must master this feat in their first five or six years. Children must first learn the letter-sound relationships of the alphabet letters, then begin to decode simple words. The importance of learning to read well cannot be overstated — when scholars do not know how to read well, it impacts the remainder of their scholastic lives and beyond.
The state of Arizona took steps to ensure its scholars met reading standards in 2013 with their “Move on When Reading” law. This legislation prevents promotion from the third grade for any scholar who doesn’t master sufficient reading benchmarks on the state’s assessments.
In this blog, we will evaluate Arizona’s progress after twelve years since this law was implemented. We’ll also take a look at how schools other than traditional district schools, such as The Leman Academy of Excellence, not only meet Arizona’s reading achievement goals but exceed well beyond expectations.
What is Arizona’s Reading Framework?
The National Assessment Education Panel (NAEP) scores the nation’s reading level achievement for scholars in the fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades. The latest average score for fourth graders’ reading ability in 2024 is 215 out of a possible perfect score of 500. As a nation, we are aware of a serious reading deficit among our youth, but in 2013, Arizona implemented its Reading Framework, aka their “Move on When Reading” law, to address this problem.
Components of Arizona’s reading law include:
- Core reading programs in schools with at least seven and a half hours per week of reading instruction
- The implementation of reading intervention programs for struggling readers, based upon screening twice per school year
- Progress monitoring tools
- Professional development plans
- Dyslexia training for staff
- Explicit evidence-based reading instruction and independent reading time
Arizona’s “Move on When Reading” (MOWR) law allocates an average of $145 per K-3 student for staffing, instructional materials, assessments and professional development per school year. Both traditional public schools and charter schools are required to submit literacy plans for approval by the state to access these funds.
Current Performance in Arizona Schools
Arizona’s MOWR law predicts that 72% of their third graders will be proficient in reading by the year 2030 and 90% proficient by 2039. From 2009 to 2019, Arizona was one of only nine states to demonstrate significant increases in early elementary reading proficiency; NAEP scores rose from 210 to 216. However, when the COVID pandemic began, NAEP scores in language arts fell from 46% to 35%.
Today, the state continues recovering from the COVID-era setbacks, with recommendations from the Department of Education:
- Require that all local education agencies (LEA) submit annual literacy plans every year
- Use the collected data to shape reading instruction needs and policy
- Expand parental notification of reading progress
- Provide $650,000 every 3 years for literacy resources and training
- Budget $8.1 million to deploy 75 literacy coaches to serve 60,000 students in 150 schools
- Institute a policy that would reward and incentivize schools for student growth in early literacy
Despite the energized efforts at the state level for literacy improvement in Arizona schools, the fact is many schools face challenges in meeting these goals. Teacher shortages impede learning, with nearly 78% of Arizona’s teaching positions now vacant.
Additionally, an estimated 25% of Arizona’s public schools are not using the Department of Education’s core reading program as outlined in the Move on When Reading policy. Some schools are not required to submit their literacy plans annually, which creates data gaps in monitoring efforts.
Another challenge in reaching literacy goals is that with today’s technology, many students arrive in college without ever having read an entire book. Reliance on screen-based instruction for reading has had harmful effects and must be balanced with print literature for a well-rounded literacy education.
Why Early Literacy Still Falls Short in Many Public Schools
Despite a state-required literacy plan, public schools still fall short in the success of early literacy learning. One detriment to success is the fact that some literacy teachers proceed without a systemic teaching strategy. They will teach phonics concepts in random, unconnected, and inconsistent methods that result in learning gaps and confusion among their scholars. Furthermore, many teachers still rely too much on context cues and picture prompts, which causes scholars to guess at unknown words rather than apply their phonics decoding skills.
Families supportive of teachers’ efforts to instruct their children often begin helping out at home with phonics instruction, but trail off as other family members’ needs and schedules compete. Without daily routines in school and at home, scholars’ opportunities for learning the necessary phonics skills are short-changed.
Early literacy goals are also subject to getting cut off due to time spent on test preparation. Test prep activities take time away from the much-needed learning experiences that help academic achievement. With a scarcity of time already in place for teaching core subjects, test prep only exacerbates this problem. The same can be said for over-emphasis on any one type of activity, such as STEM, that reduces the time for explicit phonics instruction in the early grades.
A final consideration of why literacy education falls short in our public schools is the high variability of instruction implementation from school to school and district to district. Teachers and schools within districts are not all on the same page when it comes to structured teaching. Inconsistency in phonics instruction sometimes varies widely between different schools and districts.
How Classical Education Approaches Literacy Differently
Until a few years ago, most reading instruction in schools was based on word-cueing systems and whole-language approaches. These reading strategies involved guessing unknown words by the context in which they were used and memorizing how whole words looked. Today, classrooms are seeing the return of a phonics literacy approach, which is teaching scholars to decode words by their letter-sound relationships.
Classical Education embraces the time-tested practice of using phonics with content-rich literature. Featuring classical and moral stories as well as poetry, literacy development is grounded in time-honored texts. The English language is complex; a systematic, explicit teaching strategy is necessary to help scholars learn phonics, pronunciation, and spellings and to become familiar with exceptions to most spellings. With a strategic, consistent plan and by encouraging scholars to read aloud, teachers guide them toward mastery in literacy.
In addition to phonics, grammar and vocabulary development are emphasized. Classical Education also encompasses public speaking for young scholars — they’re given many opportunities to prepare and present topics to the rest of the class.
With the smaller class sizes in classical classrooms, more time and attention can be given to scholars to foster reading fluency and comprehension.
How Leman Academy Supports Strong Literacy Outcomes
The National Reading Panel and its Science of Reading strategy synthesized research-based findings on how people learn to read. Having instilled five pillars for the successful development of reading ability, Classical Education embraces these pillars in its curricula for teaching literacy. The five pillars are:
- Phonetic Awareness
- Phonics
- Fluency
- Vocabulary
- Comprehension
The Leman Academy of Excellence, a Classical Education school, fosters literacy by emphasizing books that bring subjects to life for the reader, writing in copybooks, and narrating what they have read in their own words.
Using classical literature that stresses moral topics and critical thinking, for example, Aesop’s fables, early readers are shown how to decode words with letter-sound relationships. From simple to more complex words, grammar scholars build their vocabularies, read more fluently, and are then able to comprehend what they read. Tied to topics of history and morals, scholars’ writings demonstrate mastery of phonics and spelling.
With a high level of parent involvement at school and at home, Leman’s scholars’ reading and writing progress is transparently monitored.
Why Parents Are Choosing Alternatives to Public Schools
Among teaching shortages, inconsistent implementation of strategies in literacy teaching, and time spent on test preparation, parents are looking for an alternative to traditional school models to help their children learn to read and write. The early elementary years are the most critical because any reading delays during these years make it difficult for scholars to catch up later on.
Parents want an education model with a clear, proven literacy strategy. They want their children to grow into exceptional readers with the ability to not only comprehend what they read but also apply higher-order thinking skills such as inference, reasoning, logic, and conclusion.
The Leman Academy of Excellence is a tuition-free Classical Education charter school teaching K-8 in Colorado and Arizona. Leman Academy also offers virtual education for students anywhere in the state of Arizona. Leman excels with superior literacy outcomes, with 67% of scholars scoring at or above the proficient level of reading. Compare that to the state of Arizona’s NAEP score of 46.4% in 2024, which was lower than the national average.
Conclusion
Arizona’s Reading Framework, with its Move on When Reading law implemented in 2013, is ambitious. Many traditional schools are falling short of the goals outlined in this legislation.
However, if you’re a parent who’s looking for a different educational model, check out The Leman Academy of Excellence. They’re rising to the challenge and exceeding with clear, results-driven reading instruction.
Explore How Leman Academy Can Help Your Child Become A Confident, Proficient Reader!