A new report finds New Jersey has some of the weakest policies in the country for Effective reading instruction the research from a Washington DC based Think Tank was unveiled just after Governor Murphy announced a proposal during his state-of the state speech earlier this month to focus on getting back to the basics of literacy education senior correspondent Joanna Gagis takes a deeper look at how it'll affect your kids I hope to work with Educators and legislators to improve literacy rates among our children teach our kids the fundamentals of reading like sounding Out letters Governor Murphy's commitment to phonics in our schools during this month's State of the State address was music to the ears of Educators who've been calling for New Jersey to go back to the basics in teaching literacy the pendulum is swinging back to where literacy needs to be focusing which is on those Basics vocabulary phonological awareness phonics several years ago a new approach to reading was introduced called balanced literacy that moved away from phonics and instead had students using other cues like looking at pictures to decode words you could look at a picture and it could be a rock but it could be a pebble or it could be a stone that was really where we went wrong was we started to embrace approaches that were supposed to be Progressive but were really going to take us back Jersey can has been collecting data on New Jersey's literacy scores and found students around the state were below grade level proficiency especially students of color we knew that there was just an Eclectic sort of free-for-all approach around reading in the state of New Jersey some people are doing X some people are doing y some people are doing a little bit of both and that's not the way to get optimal results for our students Jersey can formed a group called The Legacy of literacy Coalition made up of several groups committed to teaching Basics or the science of reading they've advoc ated for the governor to update the department of education's curriculum standards we know that approaches informed by the science of reading are the best way to get the largest swath of children reading effectively the legacy of literacy Coalition sent a letter to the governor last Friday to commend his literacy agenda that they say should include some key items like science of reading training for all teachers with the appropriate curriculum appropriate screening to know exactly where students are and better communication home to parents I think a lot has to do with data so if you have the accurate data you know the areas of weakness you should be addressing those areas of weakness while at the same time you maintain the other skills that have already been mastered and that does require teachers to have a good understanding of how to teach reading so when you talk about science of reading it's really the methodology that we're talking about a few years ago first lady Tammy Murphy convened a state funded nonprofit tutoring center called the New Jersey tutoring Corps that pushes into classrooms to help students close literacy gaps they've been using the science of reading and have seen literacy scores improve from 23% proficiency to now 40% and this word that's right what we are doing works we are helping children learn to read we are helping children come to grade level proficiency research shows that if they are not um proficient in the area of literacy by grade three we know that there's a higher percentage of our Scholars who will not farewell in school um they will become disaffected Learners and they most likely will drop out by the time they get to high school updates have already begun at the Department of Education and new standards are expected to roll out in the fall of this year in Newark I'm Joanna Gagis NJ Spotlight [Music] news