CONSIDERATIONS FOR IMPLEMENTATION OF LITERACY PRACTICES ALIGNED TO READING SCIENCE: PERSPECTIVES OF BIPOC PRINCIPALS

A majority of fourth grade students in the United States aren’t reading proficiently (NAEP Reading: Reading Results, 2022). Deeper analysis of these assessment data surfaced a large gap between how our education system is serving students of color and their white counterparts. These gaps represent gaps in opportunity as access to quality evidence-based literacy instruction has been lacking throughout the United States. As the recent Science of Reading movement spreads, policies and legislation that mandate the use of evidence-based literacy practices also continue to expand. Many of these policies take aim at increasing teacher content knowledge. Missing from many states’ new literacy legislation is the inclusion of policies that ensure school leaders are equipped with aligned implementation guidance, as well as Reading Science content knowledge. Research is clear that school leaders are essential to change efforts and their effectiveness is linked to student achievement (Grissom et al., 2021). But this begs the question, how can school principals effectively support teachers if they don’t have the knowledge of Reading Science nor aligned implementation guidance? Given the complex nature of implementing a new initiative in a school, this study sought to uncover how school principals who were afforded professional development on the Science of Reading made sense of it, as well as identify the specific decisions and actions they took to support and sustain implementation. Using qualitative methods and a semi structured interview process, nine BIPOC public school principals were interviewed to understand their experiences with implementing Science of Reading approaches. The participant pool was intentionally designed to avoid white dominant thinking and provide space for voices that are often missing in the Science of Reading movement (Milner, 2020). Positionality was reflected on throughout the investigation, with careful attention to race due to the researcher being white. Findings reveal alignment between the study’s implementation framework (Bertram et al., 2015) and the decisions and actions each principal reported, with specific examples cited for each of the framework’s three implementation drivers. The resulting synthesis is captured in the Science of Reading Implementation Tool, or SORI Tool, with the goal of sharing it broadly to support other school leaders who are embarking on similar literacy initiatives. Recommendations for district leaders and members of the Science of Reading community are also discussed.