Detroit -- The little girl with purple barrettes at the end of her braids could hardly sit still in her chair, but Academic Interventionist Evelyn Smith pressed forward.
"I want to focus on your lowercase letters this morning, OK?" Smith asked the kindergartener from across the table. "You ready to work with me?"
"Lower case is easy for me," Niana Davis replied.
Smith put a piece of paper in front of Niana and asked the girl to identify each letter written on the page and the sound it makes.
It was early in the school year at the Foreign Language Immersion and Cultural Studies School, a building within the Detroit Public Schools Community District. But Niana already knew several of the letters and the sounds they make.
The letters "a," "m" and "z," she got quickly, even identifying the word "zipper" as starting with a "z." She tripped up on "p" vs. "b," a common mistake for young students.
Her sounds were close, Smith noticed, and close is not usually good enough for students to show mastery. But Smith noted Niana had a good excuse.
"I see you're getting your real teeth in there," Smith said. "I know I'm not going to hear all the sounds I want and need to hear."
The information collected in the assessment Smith was giving to Niana will help determine how her teachers will address her specific reading needs, starting with what's called her "phonemic awareness," or sound recognition.
The assessment is part of a curriculum in Detroit schools based on what's known as the science of reading, a way of teaching reading that aligns with how the brain learns to read -- one letter at a time. It focuses on teaching students a "code" to figure out words they don't know, attacking the words directly, not relying on pictures or words around the one they don't know.
School leaders have credited the science of reading for improving reading schools in the Detroit district, which is the biggest educator of students in a city where nearly half the children live in poverty and just 12.9% of third-grade students read proficiently. But the district saw growth across every tested elementary school grade in English language arts last year on M-STEP, the Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress, while the state average in third grade trended downward.
FLICS has experienced some of the Detroit district's strongest growth in reading proficiency during the last five years. In 2021-22, 34.2% of the school's third-graders tested proficient or above on the state test. Last year, that number climbed to 45.1%.
For years, many schools have gone in another direction in how they teach reading, focusing more on memorization and fostering a love for books, and putting less of an emphasis on direct instruction in areas like phonics.
Michigan is giving districts a strong shove toward the science of reading, if they aren't already there. Last year, the Legislature approved two laws around the science of reading, hoping to spur literacy growth statewide. On the 2024 Nation's Report Card, a test known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Michigan ranked 44th in the nation in fourth-grade reading.
The first new law requires schools to perform screenings for students who may be displaying difficulties with reading, including having signs of dyslexia, a learning disability that affects reading. It requires schools to then support those students using methods supported by the science of reading.
The second law requires teacher preparation programs to teach early literacy strategies based on the science of reading.
Unlike some states that have passed laws around the science of reading, Michigan did not pass a general curriculum mandate, choosing instead to focus more on screening for and addressing dyslexia. The state did offer grant money for new materials on a list of approved programs that are science based, but districts comfortable using what they already use in their classrooms will not be forced to change.
Time will tell if the laws go far enough to motivate change in districts that aren't using reading programs aligned with the science of reading.
Other district leaders said they didn't need a law to do what they now know is right, and not just for students with dyslexia -- and they are seeing growth as a result.
"I think it has been a big 'Aha' that there are certain things that we need to do to support students in developing the skills that they need to become strong readers," Plymouth-Canton Community Schools K-5 Curriculum Coordinator Jan Douglas said. "We weren't doing those things before, not because we didn't want to, just because we didn't know."
Teachers get 'Oh my God' moments
Taylor White had as much support as she could have asked for in her first year teaching in the Detroit public schools. Her mother was a teacher in the district, so White felt like she had a head start.
Eight years later, White wishes she had a do-over.
White, now the K-8 literacy curriculum specialist for the Detroit school district, said she understands much better now how to teach reading than she did her first two years in the classroom -- and it was completely different from what her university experience prepared her for.
The "oh my God" moment, she said, came after she took an intense training course called LETRS.
"I took LETRS literally right after I got out of the classroom and was like, 'Put me back now,'" White said. "Put me back right now, because I missed so much."
She started thinking of students she knew who had reading gaps, and how she felt like she now had the strategies, tools and background knowledge to help them. The training helped her to understand the science behind how the brain learns to read, White said, but also taught her how to make concepts more concrete with students by reinforcing their verbal skills with tactile ones.
The state has strongly encouraged teachers to take LETRS training, but hasn't required it, or any other training, for most classroom teachers who work with young students. The new law will require training only for interventionists, those who work with students who need additional help.
Some districts and charter schools have embraced the training, offering incentives or just trying to convey to teachers the importance of the background knowledge they will learn and how it will help their students.
"Most teachers are general ed, and they teach six subjects a day," KIPP Detroit Imani Academy CEO and Superintendent Candace Rogers said. "When you are a science of reading school, you commit to teacher education around reading."
Rogers said her charter school's teachers are "lifelong learners" who have committed to helping move the needle on literacy.
"Even though I have teachers who probably felt more comfortable with math or science, they deeply believed in the idea that literacy is liberation, and agreed to basically learn whatever they needed to learn to become a reading teacher," she said.
The Detroit school district has been putting teachers through the training on a voluntary basis and has been paying them $5,000 to do it.
Chief Academic Officer Leenet Campbell-Williams said the incentive "certainly has revved up our participation."
"But we really just need it to be a required training for teachers," she said.
The district is aiming to train all 800 of its K-5 English language arts teachers in LETRS. Campbell-Williams said by the end of this year, they will be halfway to that number.
The training, she said, helps teachers understand the "why" behind the curriculum the district uses.
"I think it's helping them better understand how to address those early learning skills for their students," Campbell-Williams said.
But the first chunk of the training is 60 hours, she said, more than the district feels it can require on its own. A mandated training has to be completed during the school day, which costs the district additional money for professional development days or time during the school day.
Detroit teachers who have taken the training, Campbell-Williams said, have shown a "slight edge" in their student growth data over those who have not.
"But we anticipate that getting stronger as more of the teachers practice the training," she said.
Seventh graders see growth
The science of reading is more than just phonics. It has five components -- phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension -- that weave together to build students' capacity for not only identifying a word but understanding it in context.
In kindergarten, it looks like the test Niana took, identifying letters and the sounds they make. In a FLICS first-grade classroom, students were talking and writing about different kinds of tools, ones they might find in their garden or kitchen, building their vocabulary and using the words in the context of their daily lives. By seventh grade, they are pulling apart full texts.
In a seventh-grade classroom at FLICS, English Language Arts teacher Ryan Dougherty gave his students a passage to read about the Lost Boys of Sudan, a group of mostly orphaned refugees who crossed the Darfur region of Sudan to escape civil war in the 1980s.
Doughtery asked his students for the passage's main idea.
Students turned to discuss with their neighbors, then their hands shot in the air when Doughtery asked for someone to share with the class. The boys were traveling, students observed, because they couldn't go home. They had to leave to survive, to find work and food.
This year's FLCIS seventh graders are the oldest students to have used a science of reading-based curriculum starting in kindergarten, when the district adopted a program called "EL Education."
As FLICS sixth-graders last year, 60% of them tested proficient or above in reading on the M-STEP.
Principal Bret Woodley said the foreign language immersion the school offers is part of the story, but the reading curriculum combined with teacher training is driving the growth.
"The writing component is something we need to continually work on, but there has been a major increase in the ability to compose an essay," he said. "... They're able to take facts and plug them in and write a supporting paragraph using concrete evidence."
Suburban district reverses deficits
In one of the first lessons of a Thursday morning at Field Elementary School in the Plymouth-Canton Community Schools, second grade students sat at their desks with a tray of magnetic letters in front of them.
Teacher Grace Brekke had her own tray of letters projected on the screen. They spelled the word "snuck." What would it take, she asked her students, to change that word to "duck?" What if "duck" became "dunk?"
Students raised their hands, calling out the letters and sounds that would have to change to make the different words.
For their next exercise, each student wrote out the sentence "Jane made lime cake for me once" on a whiteboard.
One student immediately figured out the pattern Brekke was teaching: All but one word in the sentence had a silent "e" at the end.
The Plymouth-Canton school district uses a science of reading-aligned program called UFLI out of the University of Florida.
Douglas, the K-5 curriculum coordinator, said even though students in Plymouth-Canton generally test well, the district noticed deficits in its own data. Students were missing foundational skills considered key to being a strong reader.
"That foundational skill data was really low," Douglas said. "At that time, there was more and more information coming out about the science of reading and the importance of foundational skills."
They piloted the UFLI program, fully adopting it three years ago, then layered other science of reading-aligned programs for writing and comprehension. Teachers said they saw something they had never seen: Students "excitedly asking to read, asking to write."
About 57.7% of the Plymouth-Canton district's third graders were proficient in reading on the M-STEP, up from 55.4% the year before.
Douglas said Plymouth-Canton hasn't been able to pay teachers extra to take LETRS training, but said many have done it anyway. The buy-in by teachers, she said, can be a challenge with any new program or method of teaching.
"I think it's hard for people to reconcile the idea that, you know, everything that they've been doing maybe isn't quite enough," Douglas said.