Blueprint for Literacy director seeks comprehensive plan to polish Kansas’ reading skills

Cynthia Lane, director of the state's Blueprint for Literacy program, says Kansas is improving literacy instruction from preschool to college levels. She says the next step is to blend Blueprint for Literacy with the Kansas State Board of Education's literacy program known as Every Child Can Read. (Photo by Morgan Chilson/Kansas Reflector)

TOPEKA — The Kansas Legislature directed the Kansas State Board of Education and Kansas Board of Regents to implement separate laws enacted during the past four years to elevate reading skills of public school students.

Both the 2022 Every Child Can Read Act in the hands of the K-12 Board of Education and the 2024 Blueprint for Literacy organized by higher education’s Board of Regents recognized the threat of failing a majority of 450,000 students enrolled in Kansas classrooms.

“Reading and literacy, reading and writing, are the fundamental skills in which all other learning is built,” said Cynthia Lane, director of the Blueprint for Literacy. “Literacy is directly related to health outcomes and the ability to secure high quality jobs. I like to say literacy is opportunity. It’s also about justice and freedom, because in order to have true freedom you need to have the skills so that you can make decisions for yourself.”

Evidence for urgency to the state’s work on child literacy wasn’t difficult to find. Testing showed 55% of Kansas students in third through 10th grades read at the limited or basic levels, which meant they couldn’t handle the content independently. Put another way, state exams revealed less than half read at the proficient or advanced levels.

In an interview for Kansas Reflector’s podcast, Lane said she was convinced the Legislature should weave the two literacy programs into a coordinated set of policies aimed at improving reading success in the classroom. She said educators and students would benefit from coalescing around a single vision.

“We have no common plan,” she said. “No common goals. No common accountability. And, frankly, having two laws has created confusion amongst our legislators about who’s doing what and how can we know if we’re making progress. We are advocating for a comprehensive implementation plan that brings both the pre-K-12 system and the higher education system into alignment.”

Lane said she was impressed by the Board of Education’s commitment to K-12 reforms outlined in Every Child Can Read. It required school districts to make students read proficiently by third grade by relying on evidence-based instruction. It mandated universal screening of students, better communication with parents and targeted student interventions, including one-on-one tutoring or summer school classes in reading.

“The state Board of Education and the Department of Education has done really powerful work,” Lane said.

Blueprint for Literacy required discredited reading methodologies to be abandoned by Kansas universities and to be replaced by phonics-based approaches. The law created two undergraduate college courses focused on application of structured literacy by students preparing to become school teachers in Kansas. So far, nearly 2,000 students have gone through those courses at a private or public college in Kansas. Another 1,000 expect to finish by July.

The bipartisan Blueprint for Literacy law also established two graduate courses in reading literacy. All of the state’s 18,000 elementary educators in the field must pass both courses, or a comparable curriculum, to retain a professional license in Kansas. Approximately 9,000 completed the State Board of Education’s LETRS program, which has been offered for several years.

During the past nine months, Blueprint for Literacy paid the cost of tuition for 500 teachers who enrolled in the two foundations of reading graduate-level courses. In addition, Blueprint for Literacy provided each teacher with a professional mentor to help implement reforms in their classrooms.

“The resounding feedback is that the coach has made the difference in transforming what they’re doing in their classes every day,” Lane said.

The state’s goal for Blueprint for Literacy would have 90% of third- through eighth-grade students reading at the basic level and at least 50% of those students at the proficient level by 2033. In Kansas, assessments of reading placed students on a four-level, low-to-high scale of limited, basic, proficient or advanced.

“There is urgency to move because every parent wants the teacher in the classroom to have the top skills,” she said.

Lane, the former superintendent of schools in Kansas City, Kansas, said she understood at a personal level what it meant to be a low-skill reader. She said she didn’t learn to read until the seventh grade, in part because methods at that time tended to require children to memorize words based on pictures or other cues.

“It was devastating to be in an elementary school and not read,” she said.

Lane, who went on to earn a doctorate in education, said research demonstrated the brain worked in such a way that explicit instruction in phonics — sounds that letters make — did a better job of building reading fluency and comprehension among children.

“Based on all the science and the research that’s been done, we know how to teach every child to read,” she said. “But they need instruction that first identifies what kids know and where there gaps are and design the instruction specifically to what every individual child needs.”