Research
What the research says, and what it doesn’t.
For the Record is built on the strongest evidence in adolescent literacy and on one bet the field has not tested. Both are stated here.
Claim 01
The early reading playbook works, and it stops at grade three.
Mississippi and Louisiana rebuilt early reading instruction and moved from the bottom of the country toward the middle. Then the gains flattened: eighth grade proficiency in both states rose three points in a decade. Eighth grade NAEP scores have been flat for thirty years nationally, in states that fixed early reading and in states that did not. In June 2026, Massachusetts enacted the Right to Read law, which sets evidence-based standards and twice-yearly screening from kindergarten through at least grade three. Above grade three, the statute is silent.
On the 2025 MCAS, 42 percent of Massachusetts students in grades 3 through 8 met expectations in English language arts, ten points below 2019. For Black and Hispanic students, 26 and 22 percent.
What the program does
Carries high-quality curriculum and sustained teacher and principal support, the playbook that moved the early grades, into grades 6 through 8.
Claim 02
Older students are still missing foundational skills, and comprehension instruction alone won’t fix it.
Reading Reimagined’s 2026 report, The False Divide, draws on five years and forty million dollars of research. It finds that one in four sixth graders cannot decode grade-level text, that “learn to read, then read to learn” is a myth, and that decoding and comprehension have to develop together through eighth grade: explicit instruction in multisyllabic decoding, morphology, sentence structure, vocabulary, and fluency. Below a decoding threshold, comprehension instruction does nothing. Teachers in grades 3 through 8 estimate that 44 percent of their students struggle to read their own instructional materials independently.
Several of the strongest-rated curricula already include advanced foundational lessons through grade 6. Teachers tend to skip them because no one trained them to teach morphology or multisyllabic decoding with confidence.
What the program does
A daily ten-minute morphology routine and a weekly performance reading cycle, both drawn from the routines The False Divide calls on teachers to adopt, and a map showing teachers where the foundational modules already sit inside the curricula their districts have adopted.
Claim 03
Engagement matters, and almost nobody checks.
In the federal practice guides, motivation and engagement is one of five evidence-based pillars of adolescent literacy, alongside vocabulary, comprehension instruction, extended discussion, and intervention. It is also the pillar with the thinnest evidence. A systematic review of 95 adolescent comprehension intervention studies from 2000 to 2020 found that 93 percent included a practice meant to promote engagement, 15 percent measured engagement, and 6 percent examined whether it related to outcomes. Where studies did measure it, the relationship was significant.
What has experimental evidence is engagement built into instruction rather than added on top: hands-on contact with the subject, texts connected by a conceptual thread, collaboration, and bounded student choice, coupled with explicit teaching. That model is Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction. Its strongest middle grades evidence comes from four-week units with 615 seventh graders, delivered inside integrated literacy and history instruction, which raised informational text comprehension over traditional instruction.
What the program does
Builds to the CORI model rather than importing it; pairs ELA and social studies teachers as a structural requirement, since that pairing is the condition under which the strongest engagement evidence was produced; and measures student engagement against student work across the year, which is the thing most of the field has not done.
Claim 04
Place helps, and no one has tested whether it helps reading.
In a randomized study in Atlanta, students given several arts field trips a year had better attendance, grades, and end-of-grade test scores, with the strongest effects in middle school. No study has tested whether reading anchored in place improves reading itself.
What the program does
States the bet. Place and story get a thirteen-year-old to the page; the routines turn showing up into reading. Year one measures both.
Claim 05
Fluency and listening routines work for older readers.
A fluency protocol tested in sixth grade classrooms with two hours of teacher training, in the sequence teacher read-aloud, echo, choral, partner, independent, produced significant gains for students below the 50th percentile, most of them English learners. Reading while listening to a fluent reader has evidence as a fluency support, and assisted approaches generally outperform unassisted ones. The strongest studies are with elementary students, adult learners, and second-language learners; the adolescent base is smaller.
What the program does
The weekly performance reading cycle follows that protocol, and every initial text exists in audio.
Claim 06
Grade-level text for everyone.
In a study following nearly 4,000 students across five districts, 82 percent of teachers supported grade-level standards in theory but 44 percent believed their own students could meet them, and teacher expectations were the resource most strongly tied to student growth. The research on scaffolded access to complex text is smaller than the field’s consensus suggests.
What the program does
Every student works with grade-level text; the scaffolds change, not the text. Teachers in the cohort teach the routines on real text with their own students before anyone asks them to believe anything, then study the student work together.
What we will measure in year one
Reading data on cohort students, fall and spring, drawn from what districts already collect.
A stamina measure: sustained minutes on grade-level text and pages per week, tracked across the year.
Student engagement, tracked against student work.
The county inventory: adopted middle grades ELA curriculum by district, actual usage, screener in use for grades 6 through 8.
Sources
Practice guides: Kamil et al., Improving Adolescent Literacy, IES (2008); Vaughn et al., Providing Reading Interventions for Students in Grades 4–9, WWC Practice Guide 29 (2022).
Motivation in models of reading: Duke & Cartwright, “The Science of Reading Progresses,” Reading Research Quarterly (2021).
Engagement review: Anderson, Meline & Harn, Journal of Education 203(2) (2023).
CORI, seventh grade: Guthrie & Klauda, Reading Research Quarterly 49(4) (2014); Guthrie, Klauda & Ho, RRQ 48(1) (2013); Guthrie, McRae & Klauda, Educational Psychologist 42(4) (2007).
Field trips: Erickson, Watson & Greene, Journal of Human Resources 59(3) (2024).
Older readers and decoding: Reading Reimagined, The False Divide (2026); Wang, O’Reilly & Sutherland, ETS RM-24-06 (2024); Shapiro, Sutherland & Kaufman, RAND (2024).
Skipped foundational modules: Dilgard & Hodges (2025), cited in The False Divide.
Fluency protocol: NWEA Fluency Protocol for Upper Grades, cited in The False Divide.
Listening while reading: Winn, Skinner, Oliver, Hale & Ziegler, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 50(3) (2006).
Cognates and morphology: August, Carlo, Dressler & Snow (2005); Goodwin & Ahn (2013); Nagy et al. (1993).
Teacher expectations: TNTP, The Opportunity Myth (2018).
Scaffolded complex text: Hiebert (2025), cited in The False Divide.
Curriculum: RAND American Teacher Panel; Steiner, “Curriculum Research: What We Know and Where We Need to Go” (2017); EdReports ELA review criteria.
Massachusetts: Right to Read, signed June 26, 2026, M.G.L. c. 71 § 57C; DESE 2025 MCAS results.
NAEP: The False Divide, p. 9, NAEP 2013–2024.
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