Staff photos / R. Michael Semple Youngstown State University President Bill Johnson, left, and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine share a moment before the start of Monday’s roundtable discussion on literacy at the university’s Beeghly College of Education.

YOUNGSTOWN — Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine joined Youngstown State University President Bill Johnson on Monday for a roundtable on the state’s literacy plan.

The event took place in the McKay Auditorium at the Beeghly College of Education building on Rayen Avenue and welcomed state and local politicians, civic and business leaders, local educators and students.

The conversation focused on the DeWine administration’s commitment to the “science of reading” model and showed clips from a documentary, “The Right to Read,” created by filmmaker Jennie Mackenzie and executive produced by reading advocate and television star Levar Burton of “Reading Rainbow” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation” fame.

It was the first of four roundtables DeWine will host across the state.

“We’re so pleased that you chose YSU to be a partner in this,” Johnson said to DeWine to open the event. “The single most important thing we can do for the future of Ohio is to make sure all our children have the opportunity to live up to their God-given potential. Reading is a cornerstone skill and if you do not instill it in children early, it’s very difficult to teach it to them later.”

DeWine said his administration has spent years speaking with teachers, reviewing data and building a plan based on the “science of reading” model. The former Ohio attorney general said the evidence is decisive.

“If the jury has returned, then there’s a verdict, and the verdict is that the science of reading is what works,” he said. DeWine said teachers have told him repeatedly that the approach is successful.

“The story every time is the same,” he said. “They tell me ‘as soon as we made the switch over, before we had any data, before we had test results, we could see it was clearly the way to go,'”

According to a video presentation by the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce in May 2023, the science of reading model is “a convergence of evidence from multiple scientific fields — cognitive, developmental and school psychology; neuroscience; education research; and linguistics – that describe reading, reading acquisition, assessment and intervention.”

Statistics based on the state’s standardized tests for English / language arts show that 44% of third graders are not on track and 40% are not proficient. Almost 50,000 children are not on track entering kindergarten. Nearly 53,200 are not on track and more than 50,100 are not proficient in third grade, the numbers assert.

The video states that the most vulnerable students were most affected by the lags in education caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the gaps have grown.

According to the video, the state published its first plan based on the method in 2018, and aims to update it every two years. The most recent published version is from 2020. The plan is available at education.ohio.gov/literacy.

Ohio also recently published its support programs for K-5 and 6-12 administrators to help them implement the plan. According to ODEW, the state’s guidance seeks to implement comprehensive professional development plans and programs to coach administrators on supporting teachers and students in the plan; to identify and use high-quality teaching materials; and to align all state assessments with the plan.

However, a nonprofit organization — the Reading Recovery Council of North America — filed a lawsuit in October against the DeWine administration, seeking to strike language from the Ohio budget that mandates the science of learning method and eliminates what the organization says are proven, evidence-based reading instruction methods.

In a blog post about the lawsuit, RRCNA Executive Director Billy Morasso states: “there are no peer-reviewed studies that show this method works any better than more balanced phonics approaches like those used in Reading Recovery and others. In fact, the topic remains a hotly contested debate among literacy researchers, with most leaning towards balance, cooperation, and collegiality. Without that compelling research, Ohio taxpayers should be very curious about why DeWine is so insistent on spending millions mandating unproven methods, especially considering the failure of Reading First, the last political boondoggle where structured systematic phonics was enforced — with little to show for it.”

Reading First was a cornerstone piece of the George W. Bush administration’s “No Child Left Behind” policy. The American Institute for Research was among many to criticize the program for being ineffective.

“While the evaluation found that reading performance for RFO students was stronger at the end of the grant period than when the program started, the comparison of student achievement from RFO schools and non-RFO schools did not reveal any statistically significant difference,” states a summary of an AIR study about the program.

Last year’s lawsuit, according to various media sources, challenged DeWine’s law for effectively banning something called “three-cueing” which teaches reading by including context clues like pictures along with the words. However, clips played from the documentary “The Right to Read” focused on the importance of books that use exactly that method.

“Having these books to read to children at the earliest point in their neuroplasticity will have an unimaginably positive effect on our future,” said Mark Lamoncha, CEO of Humtown Products in Columbiana.

The lawsuit was not mentioned at Monday’s event.

The conversation focused heavily on the importance of a literate workforce.

“It’s not just an elementary problem, it’s a high school problem and a post-secondary problem,” said ODEW Director Stephen Dackin. “If we have students coming out who cannot read, then we have an illiterate workforce and that is just not going to work for Ohio.”

DeWine said that in his efforts to bring companies to Ohio to expand the economy, the number one concern remaining for them after all other logistical considerations is a viable workforce from which to hire.

Chuck George, YSU trustee and CEO of multiple local companies, including Strangpresse, said reading is the only way to help grow the Valley’s future workforce.

“Both of my children are in fields that did not exist the day they were born,” he said. “How can you prepare them for a future you cannot foresee other than teaching them the fundamentals of how to learn?”

Included in the conversation were some YSU education students, who say they are being taught the science of learning method and also seeing it work in their internships at local school districts.

Zoe Belcik said she has interned at Austintown and Youngstown schools.

“This plan is being taught at every level at YSU,” she said. “In working with these students, including those with emotional and learning disabilities, I’ve seen students who came in at a (level) 2, they go after about two-and-a half-months to a 7 or 8.”

“You see real progress,” said Jack Carney, “not just in their school work but in how they interact with you, how they talk with you.”