here's ABC's Joe Bryant with tonight's Prime Focus watch the baseball Little League batting practice in the 90 degree Louise Louise a sign that damicus and kezny cook want the best for their kids all right let's get some news bud and it's that love that turned to panic not long ago there's got to be a lot of sleepless nights that come with that yes because you worry when he started grade two two-year learning to read wasn't clicking for demikus JR this sounded ounce for me it's almost as if requesting ourselves like is our child the only
one going through this almost as if but there are millions that's right traveling the country we learned demekas and his parents are far from alone we had what we found is a story about kids what does it feel like when you read I'll get mad do it with an inspiration mean about the fears Coast to Coast debate over how to teach them to read what do you do here what do you work on here all right follow the steps and about an often overlooked Race Against Time facing every school in the country struggling students read
before it's too late the order that a child gets the harder it is all right we're gonna try another one ready America has faced troubling reading scores for as long as the government has kept track every year since 1992 the Department of Education has found roughly one-third of the country's fourth graders read below what's considered the basic level in eighth grade that number gets better but not by much one in every four students in Warrensville Heights Ohio just outside Cleveland you have to love what you're doing 33-year teaching veteran Carla Pleasant explained to us helping
a struggling reader is about intervening early the younger you get them so after about I would say second or third grade it gets really tough just raise your hand does anyone here feel stressed sometimes when they read these students we met in a summer school class down the hall are nearing the end of that window they're in third grade and told us what they experience when they read how does it feel when you come across a word you don't know you get sad David here was brave enough to give reading out loud a try that
was one of the words we were learning earlier that last word right there front try that one more time you got it correct so that's so it's raft this is one of those words we were talking about earlier good job yeah sniffs sniffs what David used to figure out that last word is what we saw and heard say snore reading specialist Chantelle barhorst teaching to try to get these students up to speed one more time for me it's called phonics the sounds and letters that make up a word a once popular scientific approach proponents say
which allows students to decode the whole word than the sentence and ultimately what's on the page [Music] steps that come almost naturally for some students but not everyone so if it's helping them Crack the Code so how many phoneme boxes do we need but not everybody teaches reading the way you do does that surprise you unfortunately no for years Carla Pleasant says many classrooms in Warrensville Heights didn't teach reading that way either their solution to reach struggling readers was a teaching style called balanced literacy which is still popular in many schools across the country it's
designed to develop a love of reading and a comfort with books but it can also involve suggesting students guess certain words cookies is the picture and even look at pictures to decipher the words on the page something instructors took to calling picture power one problem Pleasant says I could tell it was not working why and I because the students weren't performing so she reversed course took to teaching phonics under the table and you were keeping that secret keeping it from your bosses keeping a secret from the bosses but getting the success in the classroom a
new school administration eventually followed her lead and began requiring the kind of meticulous phonics instruction you saw in class earlier and Warrensville Heights Elementary went from low reading scores to an a rating with the state now this school is an example for Ohio's Governor Mike dewine who's moving to require All State schools teach phonics and other similar strategies often called the science of reading a plan to reach struggling Readers first pioneered in a state that some Educators had written off as a lost cause Mississippi a decade ago students here ranked last in Reading 50th out
of 50 States today Mississippi is 21st in the nation in literacy and in educational circles that seemingly impossible turnaround even earned its own name you know what they call what happened here we've heard the Mississippi mirror right how did you pull that off we don't necessarily think that it should be a miracle that children learn to read in this classroom Dr kimiana Burke the state's former literacy director showed us how she brought her State back from the brain yeah you see me just smiling right I can't stop smiling asking the state's teachers to lean hard
into phonics the way her generation and her parents generation learned to read now chooses a brush instruction she says that was virtually missing in Mississippi classrooms and still is in many states because it fell out of fashion it was really kind of this aha moment around there's a lot of work that we have to do here are you saying schools were just graduating kids who didn't fundamentally know how to read yeah it's happened all across the country Burke now with the reading non-profit is looking for other states to follow Mississippi's lead Mississippi proved that um
you can be poor you can be black you can be Hispanic you can be all of those things and you can still be taught how to read so far by the start of this school year at least 30 States including DC and New York City have agreed requiring phonics instruction and other science of reading education to address sagging reading scores Skeptics of the phonics movement say it's an educational fad just like balanced literacy once was and there's no one-size-fits-all solution to America's reading crisis yeah so how many phonemes and it's not just on teachers Educators
say familiarizing kids with letters words and books starts at home are you saying that right now in the United States a parent can send their child to school and it's not guaranteed if they will learn how to read yes I think people would find that alarming yes it is alarming back where we started in Louisiana the state has overhauled how it's teaching reading to help students she washed like our little Leaguer to make his cook damicus also gets help from a state-funded tutoring program paying for private instruction on Phonics and other skills for damicus so
number four is right yep and the other students we met at this Sylvan Learning Center and what happens when you come up to a big word what do you do I try my best they are so excited and they cry in my office because it's life-changing it's life-changing do these issues pre-date covet or oh absolutely Christy Sharon has owned this tutoring center for more than 25 years he warns what can happen when a student doesn't get help early often times we may get a third grader who can't read at all that we have to go
back to basics you're saying for decades you've had third graders walk into this building who can't read at all yes we have yes it's more common than not I had a ninth grader once they came in and um he couldn't read it all and he didn't know his letters and Ninth Grade ninth grade determined demekus wouldn't fall through the cracks the Cook family is Overjoyed that his swing isn't the only thing that's gotten better with time and practice how does it feel when you read now good reading is the the key to life a key
every kid needs but won millions of American students still don't have we can get these children early and we can teach them to read they can do anything hi everyone George Stephanopoulos here thanks for checking out the ABC News YouTube channel if you'd like to get more videos show highlights and watch live event coverage click on the right over here to subscribe to our Channel and don't forget to download the ABC News app for breaking news alerts thanks for watching
