Mark Federman is the principal of East Side Community School, a public school in New York City for sixth- through 12th-graders. He leads workshops throughout the country on balanced literacy and ...

The new schools chancellor in New York City is advocating teachers use the once-mandated citywide but now questioned (some would say “discredited”) approach to reading instruction known as “balanced ...

Even before the pandemic, national test scores showed that only a third of American students were proficient in reading, with widening gaps between good readers and struggling ones. At the end of our ...

After decades of failure, the tide is turning in the battle over how American children are taught to read. School districts had long invested in methods that encouraged students to “guess” unknown ...

The battleground of the reading wars is a contentious and scary place. This war has been ongoing for a century, with either side gaining and losing ground as the educational pendulum swings back and ...

In a seismic shift based on cognitive science, two of the world's most influential teacher training institutions declare, “We are not teaching balanced literacy.” In recent months, Teachers College, ...

"My child can't read!" That's become a common complaint from parents. Why? It might be because kids are distracted by social media and video games. But I think it's also because reading instruction ...