AASD young students see dramatic spike in reading scores after switch to new program

For Dr. Carrie Willer, the long-rooted plant she recently plucked from her garden serves as the perfect metaphor for the radical shift in direction and dramatic rise in results in the English Language Arts at Appleton Area schools.

In just two years since the pilot program that took reading instruction from what is known as Balanced Literacy to Structured Literacy, the improvement in skills and achievement has been beyond anything Willer might have dared anticipate.

But those results, after years of stagnant improvement under the old system, have not come without a lot of expense and much sacrifice and hard work, nor without the willingness on the part of the teachers and administrators to buy in to something brand new and uncertain.

“We want to see the green growth,” says Willer, holding up the plant that trailed nearly two feet of roots beneath it. “Because green for us means our great test scores. But we forget it takes time. It takes time to understand the resources. It takes time to study. This is the part we can’t see because we’re so eager to see the green. But unless that root is really set, you're never going to see the green. This will not be sustainable.”

The plant metaphor runs in another direction, too. Not only are the roots necessary for the program to work, those roots also anchor kids who are more rapidly learning to read – and read well – in a much more promising future. To learn to read early is to free a young student up to better grasp complex learning more quickly, and the benefits are cumulative from there. 

“Learn to read and read to learn,” Willer says. 

Making the change

The Appleton Area School District was mired in slow achievement growth for years: one to two percent a year, Willer estimates. While Act 20, passed into law in 2023, mandated a shift to a more scientific approach to reading to bump up those scores, AASD had already decided to make changes. Willer, the Director of Elementary Education for 5K through 5th Grade at AASD for the past six years after 21 additional years in public education, says there had been discussion about why teachers were working so hard for such negligible results. 

“And we started to study about the science of reading and how the reading brain learns, and that cascaded from our district level team to our principals, who got our teachers on board,” she says. 

At a curriculum fair in 2023, teachers from across the district opted for two new Structured Literacy resources to replace the ones in use, settling on the University of Florida Language Institute (UFLI) phonics program and Wit and Wisdom, a comprehensive knowledge-building program, as a complementary resource.

It began as a pilot program in the 2022-23 school year before being implemented officially in the fall of 2023 for kindergarten and first grade. The numbers, as they say, don’t lie. Every category has seen significant improvement at both levels, but none are more dramatic than in phonics, one of the foundations of the UFLI program and a key building block in becoming a proficient reader. 

Up in every category

The most striking – and relevant – numbers are in reading proficiency. The results from this past spring semester reveal that 58 percent of kindergartners are reading at or above grade level, an improvement of a stunning 20 percent in one semester and a doubling of the 29 percent proficiency mark from the 2021-22 school year. For first graders it's almost as eye-popping: A 52 percent reading proficiency, up 28 points from three years ago and up 16 points over just the past semester.

The numbers from the other categories only run through the winter '25 semester but they are impressive as well. The percentage of kindergarteners performing above grade level in phonics has risen from 31 to 40 percent and was 12 points above the national average. Vocabulary (up 5 percentage points), overall comprehension (up 7), literature (up 5) and informational text (up 9) were anywhere from 7 to 13 points above the national average at the end of the winter semester.

At the first-grade level, which would include those who began the new program as kindergarteners last year, the numbers also point to dramatic success. Phonics was up eight points, and 47 percent of first graders were performing at or above grade level heading into the spring semester. That was 11 points higher than the national average. In all seven categories, which include phonological awareness and high-frequency words, AASD first-graders were performing anywhere from 3 to 11 percentage points above the national average after scoring below the national average in four of those categories at the end of the last school year.

What it means for student learning is undeniable. It also has affirmed the decision the teachers and administration made three years earlier. Though everyone at the time felt confident they were doing the right thing, the change made for a topsy-turvy couple of years for teachers who were suddenly faced with unlearning much of what they had been taught in college and learning the new system. Based on what Willer heard at a Professional Development gathering toward the end of the school year, everyone was thrilled.

“The number one response was significant student academic growth in ELA and in reading and just teachers feeling increased confidence with the resources, and really feeling like it was the right work,” Willer reports.

The science of reading

Structured Literacy emphasizes an explicit, systematic, and sequential approach to reading instruction that teaches the structure of the English language. It dramatically differs from Balanced Literacy, which proposes that reading is more intuitive, that if you give kids enough books, they’ll figure it out after teaching them beginner fundamentals, including some phonics. 

Balanced Literacy became the norm for instruction through most of the early part of this century until a recent shift to the much more rigid and scientific Structured Literacy began to hold sway. Act 20 in Wisconsin officially mandated it three years ago.

We have learned, Willer says, that while speaking and listening are intuitional, reading is not. 

“When I first took this job, our district was so balanced-literacy focused,” she says. “Give kids more books, and they'll just learn to read on their own. Let kids sit for 45 minutes and explore books and do writing, and they're going to get it. 

“And then all of a sudden, a complete 180. What we learned from the science of reading was that the brain was never wired to read. It's wired to listen and to speak, but to read requires extensive training, and that's the purpose of phonics – to orthographically map those sounds onto letters and then the corresponding letters into sounds, and that's what we're teaching kids. So when they say, ‘crack the code,’ the phonics is the code.”

Rifling through her many book packs, Willer finds the one on which Scarborough’s Reading Rope is embossed. Scarborough’s is a schema that demonstrates how the skills required for both word recognition and language comprehension weave together to produce a truly skilled reader.

Phonological awareness, decoding or sound correspondence, and sight recognition of familiar words are the foundations of word recognition, while vocabulary, language structure and verbal reason are among the foundations for language comprehension. 

“The magic is in watching kids learn how to read,” she says. “Reading the texts independently, reading them together. And this is complex text and not easy to read. Writing about that, creating their own notebooks. Then coming together in a Socratic seminar.”

Willer gives as an example the topic of transportation – how it was in the past and how it is today. That becomes an open-ended discussion, with the kids sharing from their own notebooks of ideas.

“It's incredible to see the kids – kindergartners – doing this,” she says. “The teachers comment on two things in particular: our kids' vocabulary is so much stronger than what we've seen in the past, and the writing is so much more detailed than what we've had.”

The head and the heart

Structured Literacy has always been used to help kids with dyslexia learn to read. It had also been the program for teaching all kids prior to the Balanced Literacy philosophy becoming predominant in the late 1990s.

The switch back to this more scientific method has better allowed for assessing progress and identifying those who need additional support. Willer says kids are given screenings three times a year and those falling below the 25th percentile are monitored, provided interventionists and given reading plans. The teachers themselves are also integrally involved in helping to bring those students along.

Willer credits AASD Superintendent Greg Hartjes for having the vision and the doggedness to pursue a new way of thinking about reading instruction when he took the job in 2022. Her praise for the teachers who were willing to undertake such a drastic change of direction and to fully buy in, sight unseen, is boundless.

She says they all took a leap of faith into this unknown, understanding they wouldn’t be perfect and that mistakes would be made … while committing to being faithful to the concept.

“I think anytime you make change, you have to have the buy-in, and you have to have people understanding why we're doing this and feeling that it's the right change. Teaching is the work of the head and the heart, and in order to make any change, both the head has to understand it, and the heart has to see the purpose in it.”

Those teachers were required to take 32 hours of training through the Center for Effective Reading Instruction.

“You can never give enough gratitude to people who spend all the time in a day learning something just completely different, and it's a complete leap of faith to say we're going to spend all this time learning this. That's what we asked our teachers to do. And then to repeatedly hear from them, 'it's really hard, but this is the right work.'”

And the results, Willer says, have been empowering for all involved.

‘Literacy is for all’

Parents have also gotten on board with the new program, showing up for various events that showcase the work being done and to see how their kids are learning. There have been resources provided, open houses and conference time with coaches. Willer says their almost immediate buy-in is a demonstration of just how much trust they have in their children’s teachers.  

Some of the greatest personal satisfaction Willer has received from the happy results of the new Structured Literacy program have come via parents themselves. Some send e-mails. One set of parents came to a staff meeting and told them that it’s starting to click for their child after they had struggled for so long. 

Her favorites are the videos parents send her. 

“I ended up being the beneficiary of a couple of really beautiful videos,” she says. “One was a third grader and a sibling who's in kindergarten. The third grader is reading to the kindergartner, and the kindergartner is reading to the third grader.”

Ultimately, though, Dr. Willer is most satisfied with knowing that the program is working. She sees that not just as a short-term benefit, but like that plant she pulled from her garden, one with deep and lasting roots. One that produces better citizens.

“When you think about the single most research-based predictor of socioeconomic status as an adult, it's how well you can read,” she says. “And you think about that through the lens of employment. We want to get kids to be able to read now, so later on they can choose to live the life they want to live, rather than the life they have to live because they can't read.

“And that's where you'll see liberty and justice for all. That's what literacy is. Literacy is for all.”