‘Vibe-based literacy,’ other fads destroyed education for kids

The latest release of results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress — the “Nation’s Report Card” — makes for grim reading.

There’s no sugarcoating it, and no silver linings: Scores are stagnant or down across the board, and for our lowest-performing students, achievement is as dismal as it has ever been.

But the correct response to these results is not despair. It’s to look closely at the places that seem to be getting it right, learn from them, and follow their lead.

We’re accustomed to thinking of the South as an educational backwater. That’s pure Yankee arrogance. As my AEI colleague Rick Hess recently noted in National Review, Alabama and Louisiana are the only two states in the country with math or reading scores higher today than they were in 2019, before COVID.

Mississippi, often dismissed as hopeless, is now one of the most hopeful stories in American education: Black students there rank third in the nation, and its low-income students outperform their peers everywhere else.

There are lessons closer to home, too. In New York City, Success Academy charter schools continue to post extraordinary results. More than four in five Success students score at or above grade level in reading, even though the vast majority come from low-income black and Hispanic families.

Success’s consistency underscores a key point: schools that insist on a structured, knowledge-rich curricula and high expectations for all students do better than those that chase the latest pedagogical fad.

And in Steubenville, Ohio, a working-class town far from any policy think tank, the district has for decades quietly produced some of the nation’s most impressive literacy results. Virtually every child learns to read proficiently by the end of third grade. How? Not through a trendy program or silver bullet, but by sticking with the same evidence-based “Success for All” reading model for a quarter-century.

That means systematic phonics, training every teacher to teach reading, and aggressive early intervention for struggling students.

When journalist Emily Hanford, whose podcast Sold a Story exposed the failures of “balanced literacy,” visited Steubenville, she got blank looks when she asked teachers if they had ever heard of Lucy Calkins or Fountas & Pinnell, the gurus of America’s failed reading orthodoxy, who promoted what one critic witheringly dubbed “vibes-based literacy” — prioritizing student interest and teaching them to guess at unfamiliar words rather than providing systematic phonics instruction.

Calkins’ “balanced literacy” approach, which dominated New York City elementary schools for decades, is not supported by evidence, leading to poor outcomes for many students, particularly those from low-income, minority and immigrant households.

“Steubenville had no need to pursue the latest trend, to even know what the latest trend was,” Hanford reported, “because what they were doing was working. It’s been working. For 25 years.”

That’s the through-line connecting Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Success Academy, and Steubenville: all resisted the temptation of fashion and ideology. They stayed the course, implemented practices that are demonstrably effective, and refused to abandon what works.

It’s also why US Education Secretary Linda McMahon has been touting a “back to basics” approach to literacy and drawing attention to the progress in Southern states.

The same lesson applies now in New York City. Mayor Eric Adams’s “NYC Reads” initiative is finally forcing schools to align reading instruction with the settled science of how children learn.

The program is still young, but already there are encouraging signs: this summer, the city reported that reading scores for third- and fourth-graders had ticked upward, especially among Black and Hispanic students. That’s no miracle — it’s what happens when schools adopt proven curricula, train teachers, and intervene early.

But here’s the danger: the moment a new mayor takes office there will be an irresistible impulse to scrap NYC Reads simply because it wasn’t his idea.

Whoever leads City Hall — whether Zohran Mamdani or anyone else — must resist that temptation. The single most important thing New York’s next mayor can do for children is to stay the course on NYC Reads.

Education is littered with stories of promising reforms undone by impatience, politics, or ideology. We should be skeptical of anyone promising miracles in education. There’s no such thing. What there is—what Mississippi, Louisiana, Success Academy, and Steubenville, Ohio are showing — is the possibility of steady, persistent improvement when adults commit to what works.

The secret is no secret at all: trust the science of reading, commit to it, and stick with it. New York City — and the nation — should do the same.

Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former New York City public school teacher.