Teaching Kids to Read: How One School District Gets It Right

[Passages]

An elementary school in Ohio has some of the best little readers in the nation. How they did it—and how a new law put it all at risk.

April 26, 2025

The schools in Steubenville, Ohio, are doing something unusual—in fact, it’s almost unheard of. In a country where nearly 40 percent of fourth graders struggle to read at even a basic level, Steubenville has succeeded in teaching virtually all of its students to read well.

According to data from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, Steubenville has routinely scored in the top 10 percent or better of schools nationwide for third grade reading, sometimes scoring as high as the top 1 percent.

In study after study for decades, researchers have found that districts serving low-income families almost always have lower test scores than districts in more affluent places. Yet Steubenville bucks that trend.

“It was astonishing to me how amazing that elementary school was,” said Karin Chenoweth, who wrote about Steubenville in her book How It’s Being Done: Urgent Lessons From Unexpected Schools.

https://revealnews.org/podcast/reading-steubenville-ohio-sold-a-story/

[Igel]

1. Back in '88 I was taking some ed psych classes.

Because I could take them before formal admittance to a teacher's ed program. (Which, of course, I never actually applied to.)

One of the things that the two young dissertating grad student/instructors pointed out was that we knew how to teach reading to kids. There were piles of studies showing what worked, what worked well. Then they pointed out that very few districts or states actually taught reading that way--that we spent all kinds of money on ed research, but what was political and trendy, pandering to some sort of preferred emotional or empathetic methodology, was glossy and slick and had publisher support was followed, not what used controls and had explicit protocols and well-defined data collection methods with a focus on reproducibility and rigorous analysis to make sure they were testing what they thought they were testing.