Here & Now

Bill Calls For Teaching Phonics to Boost Reading Levels

Frederica Freyberg:

The state Legislature is considering a bill promoting teaching children to read with phonics. That’s where students learn to blend letters or groups of letters with the sounds they make. A training tape from the Department of Public Instruction shows how phonics works in practice.

Teacher:

You guys have been doing an amazing job blending those sounds together to read the words. Can we fit? Fit is one of the words we practiced blending this week. Fit. Fit.

Frederica Freyberg:

Components of the bill would screen for reading skills starting in kindergarten. Add new phonics-based curriculum, train teachers on that curriculum and deploy reading coaches, especially to struggling schools. The discussion comes as just 37% of third through eighth grade readers in Wisconsin were rated proficient or advanced in 2022, and just 14% tested at those levels in Milwaukee Public Schools. Bill author Representative Joel Kitchens says this change is needed now.

Joel Kitchens:

Wisconsin always had a great tradition of being a leader and now, we are not anymore. So I think it’s past time. Whenever you change things, and especially in education, they don’t want to be told by politicians especially how they should be teaching in the classroom, so there is that natural thing, which is why we really needed DPI to buy into this. If DPI supports it, the governor is going to support it, Democrats are going to support it. So I think it’s a bill that — it’s really important and I think will have broad support and I think it is nice that this session we are getting more — we’re negotiating more, certainly, than we did during Governor Evers’ first term, and it’s tough for people to trust the other side and to trust DPI. When you asked about pushback, that’s probably what the biggest pushback is, on my side, people not trusting DPI to follow through, but they have to be involved. We can’t cut them out of it. Initially, we were not going to be investing in the curriculum very much anyway and now we’re pretty much — we’re going to buy the curriculum for the district, so that’s a pretty big expense. We’re going to pay for the training. So it is going to be a bigger fiscal impact than we originally thought, but thankfully the leaders in my caucus have recognized that really in education, what can be more important than teaching kids to read. If budgets are really tight for some of these districts, it’s going to be tougher for them to do it, but again, I think this is the most important thing I’ve ever worked on in the Capitol and I think, again, what could be more important? If we don’t teach kids to read early, it just so handicaps them for the rest of their lives.