Reading Reform Will Fail Without Families

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

Across the country, a wave of new reading legislation aims to fix literacy crises, yet there’s little direct support for families to help carry the reforms forward.  

At a recent meeting in my community, one fact hit hard: Our reading pipeline is broken. Instead of the expected 80% of students succeeding with general instruction, only 11% of Milwaukee students are on track. A staggering 65% need frequent, in-depth, individualized support — far more than the system was ever built to provide.

When a speaker cited these numbers, the crowd nodded at the urgency and applauded calls to retrain more than 1,000 teachers in evidence-based reading instruction practices. I applauded, too — schools have the greatest opportunity and obligation to provide high-quality reading instruction at scale. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that teacher training alone clearly wouldn’t be enough. 

In classrooms crowded with kids who have extraordinary needs, even the best teachers can only do so much. Better prepared teachers would be able to gradually increase the share of kids who are on track with reading and prevent more students from falling behind. But many kids would still need targeted small-group support, one-on-one tutoring, and, crucially, support from home.

Teachers, no matter how well prepared, build on the foundations kids have. The odds of reading success are largely shaped beyond the classroom. Longitudinal studies consistently confirm the essential role that families play in kids’ reading achievement. The early language experiences and alphabet knowledge students bring to school profoundly shape their literacy trajectories.

Once kids enter school, parents’ influence remains powerful but increasingly overlooked. Too often, schools unintentionally sideline parents, treating them more as homework helpers than true partners. 

Parents facing economic hardship or lingering distrust from their own schooling may not immediately see the value in engaging. Even motivated families struggle to prioritize vague school requests amid a myriad of real-life demands.

Rather than grow cynical, school staff must actively earn families’ engagement. They need to clearly, specifically, and respectfully show families how their involvement benefits their children’s development.

This is Marketing 101: speak to what matters. Frame requests in ways that align with parents’ hopes and addresses their real concerns. If parents don’t understand how a request helps their child, schools have to connect those dots.

Research from the Harvard Family Research Project shows that families make a measurable difference when they actively attend conferences, visit the classroom, and volunteer. Other studies document the value of parents engaging in literacy-specific activities like teaching letters, sharing books, and fostering reading at home. Schools can motivate parents by showing them that their efforts directly affect their kids’ reading gains.

Nearly 40 states have passed legislation to spur reading improvements and sprinkled amid the new curriculum and professional development requirements they’ve mandated are some directives for parents, too. Wisconsin’s Act 20, for example, rightly emphasizes parents’ critical roles: sharing family learning histories, monitoring learning disabilities, implementing literacy strategies, tracking reading plans, and even filing complaints when necessary. Yet, the law provides little tangible guidance or support. Ask a Milwaukee parent how to help their child meet reading expectations and you may get a shrug — not from indifference, but from genuine confusion.

Schools must translate mandates into meaningful guidance. When staff get strategic about what they ask families to do, they create space for real partnership. Generic advice like “read aloud every night” can evolve into more specific grade-level guidance like “Read this book to practice the ‘oo’ sound your child is learning in class.”

I recently observed a work session between school staff and local nonprofit tutoring groups. The educators invested months designing targeted, straightforward home literacy activities that were aligned closely with common student needs in the district. Next, they planned to test the tools with real families, revise the instructions based on feedback, and then film demonstration videos, so parents could clearly see what success looks like. Tips are helpful — but seeing another parent do it builds belief.

Once complete, these tools will provide teachers with a library of targeted activities to share with families based on specific student needs. The anticipated result? Fewer, clearer asks for families and greater impact.

Across the country, different family engagement models are emerging. In New York, the NYC Reads Family Ambassador program held 10-week online sessions to teach families the science of reading. The sessions aimed to strengthen home literacy routines, as well as inform participants who could then share effective strategies with other families. The Indiana Learning Lab hosts virtual workshops that are accessible to parents anytime, enabling them to tune in at their convenience. Both these programs acknowledge that families want to help, but need accessible, credible resources and consistent encouragement. 

Raising our nation’s reading achievement is an all-hands-on-deck effort — inside and outside of school. Teachers, instructional coaches, literacy specialists, staff, administrators and community volunteers can all support families. But for these partnerships to flourish, we’ve got to get honest about who teaches kids: all of us.

Ultimately, the strongest readers aren’t shaped in classrooms alone. They’re nurtured at home: word by word, story by story, conversation by conversation. To help reading reforms succeed, we need to do more than retrain teachers and revise curricula. We must support the first, most constant teachers all children have: their families.

Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter