The On-Ramp to Reading
I appreciate the terrific chat with members of the South Madison, WI Rotary club on Monday, 3 August 2026.
“Its very clear to me that Afi understands the difference between some of what she’s doing guided by me, and that she’s getting a new skill. This is different because she is reading, like her grandchildren.”
Ruth Robarts is a lifelong teacher and community volunteer. A tireless advocate for literacy, she has been honored with several community awards including the United Way of Dane County’s Distinguished Service Award for “improving lives through literacy” and the Rotary Club’s Senior Service Award.
Robarts has taught Head Start, GED in a Wisconsin prison, social studies at Madison’s Malcolm Shabazz High School and classes at the UW law school. In addition, Ruth served for ten years on the Madison School Board.
In retirement Ruth continues to teach. Since 2010 she has volunteered at the Literacy Network discovering the joy of working with adult students. Robarts’ expertise is in citizenship courses and test preparation tutoring.
Of the four tests that citizenship candidates take just one is reading. The citizenship tests are in English and cover many aspects of US History and civics.
Citizenship students are adults who’ve been in the country for at least three to five years. Most are not native speakers. They often have had few opportunities to read or speak English.
Ruth has been working with a 72 year old grandma from Togo named Afi. These students often had little to no formal education.
Afi is very bright and speaks at least three languages which she learned orally. The 72 year old is adept at memorizing words.. Her 13 grandchildren are bilingual.
Ruth likes that the box is comprehensive and she has all the tools in one place to build a lesson. Afi likes the cards and manipulating letter tiles.
“I am pretty sensitive to what didn’t work. This (Fast Lane Literacy by SEDSO) is a very well constructed set of materials.
I recommend this to anybody who’s working with people who haven’t been reading.”
3,888 (43.7%) Madison 4k to 3rd graders scored below the 25th percentile in a 2024-2025 national literacy comparison group.
The Wisconsin average is 37% or 97,414 students. Note that Madison plans to spend > $28K per student during the 2025-2026 school year.
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Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience, 2004–.
I look forward to discussing Madison’s literacy challenge and what might be done about it on Monday, August 3, 2026.
Evidence-Based Instruction — built on Science of Reading research, with magnetic letters that let kids master phonemic awareness before handwriting adds fine-motor demands.
Efficient Instruction — no-prep, ready-to-use lessons that let adults spend less time planning and more time connecting with the child in front of them.
Child-Centered Instruction — sequenced for early wins, so kids build real confidence instead of just repeating drills.
If you’ve ever wondered why Fast Lane Literacy leans on magnetic tiles before handwriting, or why lessons stay short and focused, this page walks through the reasoning in plain language.
Read the full breakdown →
Curious about the kit itself? See what’s included at sedso.io.
Part 1 of a conversation (excerpt) with Christine Truman Janes during Wimbledon 2026. Soundtrack via Wimbledon Radio, the rest a “mash up”.
This shift is often referred to as a literacy crisis. And it’s true that Americans’ basic reading skills are declining. Fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores have slid for the past decade. Amanda Kordeliski, who is on the board of the American Association of School Librarians, told me that she and her fellow librarians have had to buy new books to accommodate students’ diminished reading levels. Some of the most popular are graphic novels: updated classics such as the Magic Tree House series for elementary-school students, and manga for middle and high schoolers.
In 2024, in a national test, just 35 percent of high-school seniors were “proficient” at skills such as analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument. About the same number scored below “basic,” meaning that they may struggle to draw conclusions from concepts explicitly included in a text, or to use context clues to determine the meaning of an unknown word. Adult-literacy scores have also dropped: Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent.
And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.
A researcher at Williams College set out to study variations in curiosity across elementary school classrooms. She had to abandon the study. The problem was not funding or methodology. As researcher Susan Engel later noted, there was such an astonishingly low rate of curiosity in any of the classrooms she visited that there was nothing to measure. In one classroom, she witnessed a teacher respond to a visibly curious child this way: “I can’t answer questions right now. Now it’s time for learning.”
Read that sentence with fresh eyes. A child’s genuine question was treated as an interruption to learning. The institution designed to cultivate the mind had decided, in that moment, that curiosity was a liability.
Before starting school, children ask their parents an average of 100 questions per day (Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question, 2014). In school, the rate drops to fewer than one question every two hours. When a teacher-librarian introduced open questioning exercises across grade levels, kindergartners generated questions so quickly they could not write them all down. By fifth grade, many students could not produce a single question to ask. Susan Engel documented a fifth-grade classroom where two full hours passed without one student asking anything at all.
A mind that arrived overflowing with questions has learned, systematically, to keep them to itself.
At their simplest, its tests find out how well people can make sense of the instructions on a pill bottle, or work out how much wallpaper they must buy to redecorate a room. At more advanced levels, they explore how well people can draw sound conclusions from complex analysis and charts. Test-takers are divided into five levels of acuity, in each discipline. Level 1 ought to be achievable by a rich-world pupil at the end of primary school, says Andreas Schleicher of the oecd.
Some 160,000 people of all ages were tested in the last round (the results of which were published at the end of 2024). The Economist asked the oecd for data just of those under 35 who were enrolled in “tertiary” education at the time they took the tests. That includes students in all universities along with learners in most kinds of colleges (but only those taking courses that are in theory more advanced than are offered in high schools).
Many of them do very well—but a striking share perform abysmally (see chart 1). Across rich countries some 8% of students in tertiary education notch up a score in literacy no better than one might expect from a ten-year-old child. The share is about the same for numeracy. Worse, the share at or below this bar has risen since the tests were last run, a little over a decade ago. The share of very poor performers in literacy has more than doubled.
By Russell Samora. Design & Illustration by Shelly Tan.:
Similes are all around us. But, if you haven’t considered this figure of speech since grade school, here’s a refresher: similes compare a shared quality of two things, often using “like” or “as.”
I pulled every simile in the form “as ___ as ___” from tens of thousands of fiction books for the top 500 most common adjectives.
To put you in a writer’s mindset, fill in the blank of the simile below.
Director of Teaching and Learning Katie Grundahl presented findings from early childhood literacy screening data for 4K through 3rd grade students to the School District of Jefferson Board of Education.
“This is the required assessment by the state of Wisconsin under Act 20,” Grundahl said. “You’ll see all the different assessments in the grade levels (and) the amount of time it takes to administer.
“One thing that’s really important for everybody to understand when they’re looking at last year’s early literacy screening data to this year’s early screening data is they updated the norms.”
Due to the changes, Grundhal wanted to take more time to explain to the Board how the differing standards are interpreted.
One graphic depicted the early literacy scores for a combination of kindergarten and first graders.
“You’ll see a higher score in spring or in fall, like we predicted would happen,” Grundhal said. “It fell in winter, and then we threw it back in. Right now, we’re sitting at 55% of students who are proficient…Not proficient, they’re above the 25th percentile.”
To continue to work with students, letters are sent home to encourage parents to send their children to summer school. It is not required to attend, though it helps in the long run.
