More than 550 educators from more than 45 school districts across the region are talking and hearing Saturday about how children learn to read and how best to teach them.
"This work is about building teacher knowledge so they can take the right tools and apply them diagnostically and prescriptively," said Tracy White Weeden, president and CEO of Neuhaus Education Center in Houston. "It’s not about a silver bullet. Teachers are the silver bullet."
Weeden is one of the experts in the "science of reading" from around the country who are in Buffalo for a daylong conference hosted by the Western New York Literacy Initiative at the Buffalo Convention Center.
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The science of reading is based on research into how children learn to read. The approach gives children tools to sound out and decode a word, instead of the method in which young readers look for cues when they come to an unfamiliar word and question if it makes sense, if it looks right, and look for a clue in the picture.
"It's not just the pandemic. Yes, those scores went down precipitously after the period of remote learning, but they had been stagnant or declining for over 20 years," said Natalie Wexler, an education writer and author and keynote speaker at the conference.
In addition to knowing how to decode a word to pronounce it, children need a lot of academic knowledge and vocabulary to help them comprehend what they read, Wexler said. She said the failure to teach children how to read is a story that needs to be told.
"A conference like this is an excellent opportunity to learn more about how and why this is going on and what we can do to change the situation," Wexler said.
More than 20 organizations support the Western New York Literacy Initiative, including We the Parents and its co-chairman Samuel Radford III.
"We’ve been talking about the problem for way too long. We we need to have partnerships where we are working toward real solutions," Radford said.
