Episode 10: Insights on Literacy and Policy with Chad Aldeman

Katie Megrian speaks with education policy expert Chad Aldeman, founder of Aldeman Education LLC and creator of ReadNotGuess.com, about early reading development, intervention, and broader K–12 trends.

Chad shares that his son’s kindergarten experience during COVID revealed that his son had not been taught to decode and was guessing words. That realization led him to create Read Not Guess, a free, sequential, parent-facing resource with Levels 1–3, a “daily-ish decodable” program, and an optional app to support sound practice at home.

They discuss declines in national achievement that began around 2013–2015, with the largest drops among lower-performing students. Chad explores possible contributors, including shifts in accountability policy, increased screen time, declining independent reading, and reduced emphasis on foundational skills. The conversation also highlights systems such as Mississippi, Louisiana, DoDEA schools, and England that have emphasized phonics and knowledge-rich instruction.

Chad explains why rising per-pupil spending has not translated into comparable teacher salary growth, citing increased benefit costs and staffing shifts, and discusses alternative staffing and compensation models.

The episode closes with guidance for families: look for high standards paired with high support, seek objective indicators of progress, and do not wait to intervene when a child is struggling.

Resources:
ReadNotGuess.com
chadaldeman.com

https://www.chadaldeman.com/p/do-not-wait

https://www.the74million.org/article/these-schools-are-beating-the-odds-in-teaching-kids-to-read/

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to the Reading Symphony Podcast, the place where clarity meets compassion. This is where families and caregivers get evidence-based trustworthy information about how reading develops, how to understand reading progress, and how to turn overwhelming information into simple, actionable steps that help every child thrive. I'm your host, Katie Megrian educator, parent, and relentless advocate for helping every child become a joyful, confident reader. Let's get started. Hi everyone. Welcome to this episode of the Reading Symphony Podcast. We have an incredible guest today Chad Aldeman. Chad is the founder and principal of Aldeman Education LLC. He consults nationally with leading organizations working for dramatic improvements in K to 12 education. Chad also runs readnotguess.com, which helps parents work with their children on early reading skills. Chad has previously worked at the Ed Genomics Lab at Georgetown University, bellwether Education and the US Department of Education. He has published a wide variety of reports on K to 12 and higher education, including work on accountability systems. School choice and teacher preparation, teacher evaluations, and teacher compensation. He served as the founding editor for teacher pensions.org and continues to work on ways to improve retirement benefits for educators. Chad's work has been featured in the Washington Post, New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Chad holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Iowa and a master's of Public Policy degree from the College of William and Mary. Welcome, Chad. Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here. I've been a fan of your writing for a long time, and most recently you wrote two pieces that I think were some of the most important ones to come out this year on the importance of early intervention for readers. As well as the article on the schools that are beating the odds and teaching reading to low income students. And I'm so grateful for you putting that work out and all the other work that you do into the world around policy. Thanks. Yeah. Those are both, two of the pieces that have resonated the most with people. I'm so curious, what led you to become so passionate about policy Have you taught, have you been a school leader? Like where did this interest and passion come from? Yeah, I was in a teacher preparation program at the University of Iowa and where I did my undergrad, and then I had a health scare and had to take some time off from school. When I came back, I decided that I didn't necessarily want to be in the classroom, but I did still care about education as my passion and so. I like reading, I like researching and doing data analysis, and so I use those skills towards education. I've been working mostly in the nonprofit space for my whole career. I did a stint at the US Department of Ed. But yeah, policy was my background and reading research and trying to translate it for normal lay audiences. So cool, and we'll definitely, talk about the policy piece in a moment, but I would love to hear a little bit more about your creation of readnotguess.com and where that came from, especially since you haven't formally taught reading in the classroom as a reading teacher, what was the inspiration behind that and how did you actually learn how to put all that content together? So I mostly worked on policy. I did not work on curriculum or anything like that. I thought that was left for professionals who knew more. And, even with anything that got close to curriculum, I never felt like I was. Prepared enough to do that. I got interested in this work though through a personal connection. My own son, during the COVID crisis, he was in kindergarten and he came home in March and we sort of thought he could read. We sent him up to his room to do independent reading time. He, we had been to his school. Celebrate his reading superpowers. And a lot of, in retrospect, these are red flags that I should have caught, but I didn't, even though I was working in education policy for 20 years beforehand, and when he would come to a word he didn't recognize, instead of looking at the word, he would look up to the ceiling and think about what the word might be. And we worked with him to focus back on the page and he had never been taught to sound out words, so we worked with him on the phonetics, early phonetic skills. We bought some books and just trying to get him back on track, and so that was the. Impetus for it took me about a year long journey of working with him and then thinking through, Hey, if I'm a parent and I work in education policy and even I didn't catch it, what else could I offer for other parents? And so I started readnotguess.com as a summer program. Just very early basic skills like Pat can sit on the mat and it's all sequential. It was all free. And we got 1100 users in that first summer. So I just kept, I just kept going with it and I, I said, okay, we've got this Level one program already. I kept going and I wrote a level two and a level three, and those are now all free on the website for anyone who wants to use it. I've kept going. And so the latest as I have what I call my daily ish decodable program for kids who are a little bit older who can do the pat can sit on the mat, but they might still struggle with more complicated endings and just need more practice and maybe have gaps. And so that works on a sound per day. And there's, there's rhyming, blending. Working on isolated words. Then there's a a hundred, 120 word story that's, I call it decodable ish. Depends. Decodable, words depend on the kids' own abilities, so, in the reading space, we talk about text that's decodable, but it really does depend on the reader. And so the decodable when I use it is referencing skills that we've worked on. We sort of loop back on skills that we've worked on in the previous couple weeks to reinforce those, and then we sort of say at some point we either master them or we have a new batch of kids. And so it quote of loops around on itself. And anyway, so all those are free on the websites. There's an app version as well for parents who want to hear the sounds and, and be able to work, interact with it that way. Yeah, and I can say as a parent who uses the resource, it's so nice just to have it arrive in my inbox every day. The, like today is a letter M, or here's a word building game. And I use the daily ish decodables a lot with my second grade daughter. My kindergartner picked up the code really quickly. My second grader has needed a lot more practice. She's making great progress, but having those materials and even the games as well is awesome. And, I'm curious, what do you see in terms of your user base? Yeah. So first of all, it's a supplemental program. It's designed for parents to work with their kids. So it's not necessarily meant to replace what's being offered in the school. And I think of it as a supplemental for parents to instill good habits from the beginning. So this would be a great thing to do for entering kindergartners or kids who are going back into first grade. As a summer skill, it's also something good, as you said, as a reminder to keep filling in gaps, the daily decodable, in particular for kids who may have gaps in their knowledge. So it's both to instill good habits from the beginning and it's also for parents to help see. This is one of my reasons for doing this work is'cause I didn't recognize it early enough. Mm-hmm. And I had wished I had caught it earlier. We have two kids. My older child had more experience in a Spanish immersion preschool. And so she had been taught how to sound out and in Spanish it's much more phonetic. It's ma me mo pop, hey pee po. And they just work through it in a way that my, my younger, my son didn't get. And so readnotguess.com is is supposed to help parents catch those things and flag them earlier. It's also, frankly, my kids are in public school in a wealthy area in Virginia and Fairfax, Virginia, and if Fairfax, Virginia was using a balanced literacy program, it could be anywhere. And so that was a big part of it. You never know what the school is gonna provide. And this is a good way for parents to become involved in their kids' reading progress. Yeah. Is balance literacy still used in the district? To their credit, they have changed. They have adopted a new curriculum that's much more sequential. It uses both phonetics in their early grades. It also is more knowledge building than what my kids received. My kids really got the short end, they didn't do handwriting, they didn't do spelling, and so, it was sort of hit or miss. One of my kids really learned it from reading and they got it early and just sort of kept growing. You know, in the reading we talk about the Matthew Effect and mm-hmm. She's a reader. My younger child. It's been more of a struggle and so was harder in that sense. Yeah. And I love what you said too about the, just the way that parents might use this in the summer as well. Maybe they do have a typically developing reader and summer comes along and there are these just very, quick lessons that could. Be great for review. So that's a really great idea that I wanna think about for my own kiddo who's in kindergarten too right now. There's a lot of good resources out there. One of the things that I thought about when I was creating this program is I'm wasn't an expert in reading per se, but what one of my skills, I think I am good at, is translating complicated materials for lay audience. So all of the lessons, sort out to about a fifth grade material. So they're written in a pretty accessible language and they're bite-sized lessons. This is one of my experiences. I had purchased the book. How to teach your child to read in a hundred easy lessons. I bought it from my older child and I was like, well, I'll just use this as a supplement and it'll be fine. But you turn to a page in that book and it's got its own language. It's got all the different slashes and red dots and arrows and things that was inaccessible for someone who just wanted to dive in and dip in and Read Not Guess is sort of the opposite of that. It's like, it's supposed to be very, very simple and straightforward. It's meant that anyone could pick it up and it would be good for any family and they could do it as they wanna proceed. Yeah, I totally agree. I think it's the easiest, most effective resource I've seen that's parent facing. Thank you. Yeah, that's one of the goals. It's great to hear. A lot of parent resources are either really high level, like read to your child and go to the library, which yeah, that's helpful as a reminder. Or it's like what I was saying before here's a textbook of a system that parents need to understand or there are a lot of apps out there where it's like, hand your phone to a child and trust that the app will work. And you know, some of those are good. Some of them are sort of gamified to keep kids sucked in. Some of those are more entertainment than actual educational. Some of them have some of the same like balanced literacy problems. So yeah, I was trying to serve a different sort of niche market for this product. I have a lot of suggestions for books that pair with it, or as you mentioned earlier, like games or things you can play in the car or when you're waiting or things like that. Even though you designed this amazing resource for parents and kids, you're clearly a policy person as well. I was really interested to learn that you worked for the Department of Education back in the mid two thousands, and it was during the Obama administration. Something that's interesting. When we look at the data, a lot of people will incorrectly say that COVI was when we started to see a real decline in reading and math outcomes nationally, and that's just not true. It started before that and the decline really does seem to start around 2013, and I would just love to hear your insights on that. Why do you think that is? Yeah, there's a lot of factors. I'll just say at the outset, I've written about this a lot for the 74 million. Those are all free on the website if you're interested, and trying to unpack some of these causes. The first thing to note is that you can see these trends across a range of different tests and subjects. So on the NAEP, which is our nation's report card, you can see it in math, you can see it in reading, you can see it in fourth grade, eighth grade, 12th grade. You can see it in some of the international tests like TIMMS and PISA. And so. In all of these tests, what we're seeing is that achievement in the United States peaked around a decade ago, somewhere between 20 13, 20 15, and it's been declining since then. The other thing to note is that they didn't decline equally. So it's not that. Students at the top declined at the same rate as students at the middle and students at the bottom. It's really been a huge decline at the bottom. So the bottom has really dropped out. And lower performing students have fallen much farther behind than they were about a decade ago. So what are the causes for it? One I think like easy to pinpoint one in my head is accountability. So school accountability policy changed quite a bit during that era. So for listeners who are somewhat familiar with No Child Left Behind, the Obama administration first issued a set of waivers, which I actually worked on when I was at the US Department of Ed, in 2011. And then those continued on. And then in 2015, the waiver policy was codified by Congress called the Every Student Succeed Act or essa. And essentially it took the pressure off schools to help all students improve. Instead of having a pressure on all schools, it said on states only had to identify the lowest of the low performing schools and then maybe look at some subgroups as well. But that was totally left to the states. And so a lot fewer schools were on the hook for school accountability performance, and in particular, a lot schools. A lot more schools were left off the hook for low performing students. And so that aligns both in the timing. And with the direction of the achievement declines. That said, it's not the only cause by any means. There's a psychologist named Jean Twenge, which is who has pointed out that that era is also about when we hit 50% saturation of cell phones and. So that could be another big factor of just more screens in the home. Screens also took off in schools around that time as well. So a lot of changes potentially both in the home and in school, which could be a factor there. And so I don't want anyone to take away I think accountability is the only thing that's driving it. But I do think it's in the mix. So there's accountability. Screens at home, screens at school. There's been other theories as well about funding. I don't think it's about school funding. There was a decline. In the wake of the Great Recession, which hit about at the same time. But school funding has increased over the last five or seven years, depending on the state. And so we haven't seen a rebound in student achievement, even though funding has increased. Also some people wanna talk about staffing shortages and. That is a complicated topic, mainly because we don't have fewer people in schools. Schools actually employ more staff than they ever have, both in total terms, and especially on a per student basis. So it, it can't be just purely about staffing either. So there must be some other cultural factors at work. You can also pinpoint one of the things about reading. So there's been a long-term decline in free reading at home, and that's for adults as well as for children. So people are picking up books. Seeking out books as their form of entertainment. cause books are competing with social media and YouTube and all other things that are fun to do. And books are losing right now, unfortunately. I'm curious, I know you're not saying accountability is the only issue you gave really great examples of other factors that could be at play. What are some of the rebuttals you get around that? A couple things. One, some people think, I mean, that we should just go back to No Child Left Behind. And I don't think that's the right answer. No Child Left Behind had some flaws. A lot of flaws. A big one in my mind was it focused on proficiency and it said that it set a goal that all students would be proficient by the year 20 14. And that was a ambitious goal and it led to more and more schools being caught up in this accountability trap. And that was probably unhelpful. By setting proficiency as the goal rather than growth. It didn't include how much students grow from the fall to the spring, and so I think that would be a better way to look at accountability going forward is growth. Another sort of sub one that I've written about is a lot of people want to talk about, well, if, if the bottom is dropping, that must be about subgroups. When I say subgroups, I mean federal law requires 10 different groups that states look at including racial and ethnic categories, English learners, students, disabilities as and, and so no Child Left Behind said school had to perform well for all of those individual students. When, when I say that the bottom is dropping, the bottom is dropping among all of those groups. And so it's not that English learners are causing the achievement declines, it's that low performing English learners are declining, but low performing non-English learners are also declining. And non low incomes, non-students with disabilities are also declining. And the bottom is just falling out. And I think it's something about achievement at the bottom. This goes into something we haven't talked about yet, which is basic skills and the debate between conceptual versus procedural understanding. Particularly in reading. We're seeing that kids don't have the basic skills and they're also not picking up some of the content knowledge they need to access higher order skills in math they're struggling with the basics as well, and I think some schools have have skipped those. There's been a backlash against times tables and things like that. I do think that helping kids master the basics is probably called for, given the recent trends. And we've said, well, the basics are rote, memorization, or drill and kill. And it's not fun. But, it goes back to why kids need a basic foundation and phonics, why they need to master their numeracy and be fluent and be fast with some of their multiplications. Because if you can't do those things, then you'll struggle in the higher order skills. And so I think there's been an infatuation with higher order critical thinking, creativity skills, and not necessarily the depth around, well, you have to be a creative thinker about something. And the best chefs know their food really well, and they know how to mix and match, and they learn the basics before they go into that higher order skills. And same with athletes. We would never say. Go, work on dunking before you learn to dribble in basketball. And so I just think we've sort of lost that, foundation along the way. Yeah, I agree. I think writing is another piece even just writing at the sentence level and making sure that that's solid before we're moving on to paragraphs and whole essays, because if you can't write a sentence, you can't write a paragraph. I am a novice in this, but I'm really interested in the writing revolution. Some of the methodologies they've used to give kids sentence prompts and to help them and show them here's how to write a good sentence and then build from a sentence into a paragraph, into an essay. And, I just think we've lost some of those and I think we need more of that, probably. I think there's been a tendency over the last 20 years to say, well, kids don't need content knowledge or background knowledge, they can just Google it. And that was the saying 10 or 20 years ago. And now it's like, well, they don't need to learn it because AI is just gonna take it over. And I really think that's the wrong way to go about things. I think kids need that background knowledge in order to keep building. And so if they have a little bit, they can get more. And, I think we've sort of lost that fundamental awareness of how people think and brains work. Again, I'm sort of a novice on this and I can't prove it, but I do think that there's something about that going as well. Well, I think we have some data from the southern states of Mississippi and Louisiana that showed growth. Yeah, so the national trends are pretty pervasive in the vast majority of states across the country. We see these achievement declines, we see the bigger declines at the, for the lower performing students. But there have been a couple exceptions that have broken that trend. And the states that you mentioned, Mississippi, Louisiana, have really done it. There was a couple pieces that have paid attention to the Department of Defense Education Agency, which also has done really well over the last 10 years. And while other states have declined, they have not, which is kind of unusual. And then the other international countries that have done well, like England, and they've done a lot of the stuff that we've talked about. Both phonics and they've done a times table test. They've done a lot on the core knowledge as well. So all of those things that have in their playbook too. To go back to the accountability piece just for a moment, when I taught in New York City in 2004 through 2006, so still very much Child Left Behind Era, I taught self-contained fifth and sixth grade. When it was testing season, we had our reading test in, in March. And so I remember my administrator saying, okay, from January to March, you will only teach reading. You will not teach science, you do not teach social studies, math, And you're gonna use this book from pearson to to practice. And then, and then the math test was in May. And so from March to May, we could not teach any other subjects, but, math. And one of the things that I was thinking really carefully about when I left New York and was moving to Boston and trying to find the right next school, the question I would ask every principal who interviewed me was, what's your perspective on teaching to the test. And I landed at Brook because the principal who was founding the school said, well, I think that if you teach to the standard from day one, that's a lot different than teaching to the test. And I think in the last 22 years, my thinking has evolved a little bit. If you teach to what the science tells you about how kids learn, I think that we should be able to roll up to an assessment and kids do really well. Yeah. There's lots of different facets we could explore here. One I think in the United States is pretty unique in the sense that we have English tests that are measuring comprehension as a skill. And we then treat it as a skill for instruction. We say, well. We should just have kids practice finding the main idea of a story and that's how we should prepare for the test. And oftentimes that's actually kind of counterproductive that they don't need that help. What they need is to continue developing their science and social studies and background knowledge and lots of different literature and, and poetry and all different forms. And that is what will be helpful on the test. And when I say that the US stands alone, I think England is a good example here. Their tests are much more tied to content. They're more alike our AP tests here in the States where there's a body of knowledge and teachers do teach to the test in ap, but it's content rich. It's not about a particular skill or a strategy like a lot of our reading tests are, unfortunately. And so there's implications for the classroom there, there's implications for how we're measuring this at the assessment level. Lots of good things there. Pivoting a little bit, you mentioned, the staffing piece around student to teacher ratio. I would love to hear the research you've been doing around the teacher workforce and thinking about our audience, anything you think would be helpful for our listeners to know about from that lens. Yeah, there's a couple things I would say about that. One is, i've done some work on this. The reason Foundation has done some work on this of looking at the disconnect between school spending and teacher salaries. So the reason Foundation looked at the state level and they said over the last 20 years. Basically every state has increased their per pupil, inflation adjusted school spending as teacher salary, have teacher salaries risen as fast, and they found that in no state have teacher salaries kept up with the increases in spending. So that's interesting and that's depressing. Where's the money going? And once you start unpacking it, you can see a couple things. One. Benefit costs, particularly on the pension side, is eating up an increasing share of the amount we're spending in education. Massachusetts is an example of this, but lots of states, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, have very high pension costs which keep rising and rising, and people don't think of that as education spending, but it comes out of education budgets sometimes at the state level, sometimes at the district level. The other big trend has been staffing. So as I mentioned earlier, schools today employ more people than they did in the past. So when I went to school in the 1990s, we had more schools on average, we had more staff on average than my parents did when they went to school in the sixties and seventies. And then today when my kids are in school, they have more staff than when I was in school. And so we just keep increasing the number of people working in schools. Some of that is on the teacher side. The teacher student ratio has fallen in most states over time. A lot of it is in non-teacher staff, at the administrative level, some supporting particular student groups like English learners and students with disabilities, but even with students with disabilities, the staffing counts have grown faster than the rise in students identified for special services. I did a piece for education next, and I don't have the exact stats in front of me, but there's been an increase in the share of students identified for special needs services, but the share of teachers working with those students has increased about five times faster. We also have more paraprofessionals. We have more district staff and they're doing a lot of different things, administrative work, more coaching, but all of that means that there's less money available for the classroom teacher. And so that's a trade off. Some of that is good. Some of that may be not so good. If someone in the audience is thinking, well, what can I do at the local level? I think it's looking at the ratios over time and thinking about whether as a teacher you'd prefer some of that in the form of cash and higher salaries that you could pay for mortgage or take vacations or whatever. Or you really value having more staff, either at the district level to help with curriculum decisions or HR or other things. Or some school-based supports, like we have more counselors, we have more nurses, we have more teaching assistants and so all of those things are, are part of the budget that are being eaten up there. Is there any large scale research on teacher reported answers to that question? Not a lot. There's some that are often hypothetical. So they'll give teachers two different job offers of mm-hmm here's how much you can make, and then you get, an extra teacher assistant versus here's how much you can make without the teacher assistant. I think a lot of times it's more like surveys of. Oftentimes the unions will do this and they'll survey their members and say, would you like to have more nurses and more counselors in your schools? And teachers will say yes. Like, who wouldn't want that? But at the end of the day, they're not necessarily saying, well, if we hire more counselors and nurses, that means we don't have money for raises, and I don't think they're necessarily considering some of the trade-offs that the district budget office has to face. So that's probably the main thing is they're just not looking at it in a cost equivalent manner. And so, you know, having a teaching assistant in a classroom carries a salary and benefits and paid time off and all those different factors, so it's not nothing. There's a semi-famous school in New York City that pays teachers. I think they're paying$140,000 now. And with that comes an expectation that they're gonna have fewer staff in the building. And so the teachers are gonna have to do more responsibilities and it's sort of a trade. That school has been around for a decade now And the other one I point to is I wrote this piece for the 74 about team-based teaching models. And what those do essentially is say rather than having one teacher lead one classroom, what if we assigned a team of four to eight teachers to oversee four to eight classrooms? And then you can have teachers at different levels, you can pay the leaders of those teams more money for taking on leadership responsibilities. And those models do have good results, both in terms of teacher satisfaction and student growth scores. Those are growing across the country particularly in the south, I would say. North Carolina has a state level program that helps districts scale up those types of initiatives. Texas has one as well. Teacher Advancement Project is 20 years old and has a similar type of master and mentor teacher roles that get paid more money and work together as a team, or there's a newer initiative out of Arizona State called the Next Generation Workforce, and they're working with schools to do similar things as well. And so all of those I would recommend, and I think the people working there are trying interesting things that sort of break the mold and use staff and different smarter ways. The other thing I think people listening to this may be surprised when I say that we have more staff.'cause there's been so much news about a teacher shortage and it's harder to staff struggling schools, inner city schools, schools with high proportion of minority students, et cetera. And those are true. But we still are growing, so there's more teachers than ever. And even as some of those schools might struggle to hire, like they might want to hire even more than they're able to hire. That suggests that districts need to think differently about the shortage areas. So rather than just saying, well, we don't have any say over where teachers go, I think districts and schools could take a stronger role and say we want to pay teachers extra to take on harder jobs and harder assignments in special ed or in high poverty or low performing schools right now, those schools are the ones that struggle to keep teachers and they often have a churn of early career, lower paid teachers. And if districts leaned into that and said, we actually want to create more stability in those schools and we're gonna send more financial resources to those schools, it could work, if they wanted to. Oftentimes they have chosen not to for other political reasons. One of my goals for this podcast is to help us all better understand what we can demand from schools. What are you thinking about most in terms of what you can do to make sure your kids are getting what they need? So one, I realized that school districts, particularly large ones, are like big ships that are really hard to steer and turn. And so you can as a parent, certainly work in advocacy to try to change and steer that ship in a different direction. You could leave and go to a different ship that's steering in a direction that you want or you can try to find and make sure that your child has connections within their school. And I think that's where I end up oftentimes is looking for and making sure that my kids have a connection that they trust that's holding them to high standards and providing high support. This sort of combination of high standards and high support, is what to look for. And you're not gonna get it with every school. You're not gonna get it with every teacher, but to at least find an outlet for them. That's one thing. And then the other thing. You mentioned this piece that I wrote earlier in the year called Do Not Wait. Essentially, if you see your child struggling, don't wait around. Don't assume that the school is gonna take care of it. You do need to take some steps either to work directly with your teacher, maybe if you have other school options available, you should look into those. Find other ways to get adults into your child's life that are taking care of them. Could be after school, it could be sports, could be church, whatever that might be for your particular situation. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Thank you. I think that's so important. The data tell us that if we wait often students do not catch up. That's the main lesson on math and reading. If kids are struggling. In K through three, the longer it goes, the harder it is for them to get back on track. And so you know, depending on the age of your child, don't wait. Don't listen to teachers who say, well, this is, we'll just wait and see how they're gonna do. This is another one I'd say is. Parents often don't get unvarnished information from their teacher. They get sort of sugarcoated information or if the child is quiet and well behaved, then maybe we don't pay as much attention to their academics. Teachers might say reassuring words like, oh, they're a good child, and they get along, they have lots of friends, and those are all important too, but look for objective sources of information about how they're doing in reading and math, especially in their early grades, and making sure that they're mastering those fundamental skills. That's such great advice. Well, you probably don't hear it enough, but thank you so much for all of the work you're doing on the backend to try to move the needle. And I'd love if you could just remind us where people can find you if they want to learn more. Yeah. Well thank you first of all, and thank you for all the work that you're doing. You can find all the Read Not Guess on readnotguess.com. Those are free, and you can sign up at any time. I also publish a substack that's free, chadaldeman.com where I round up all the latest research and news and offer my own insights on things that I'm seeing in the data and other policy trends. Thank, Chad, excited to put the tips out into the world that you shared with us today. Thank you so much for listening to the Reading Symphony Podcast. My hope is that each episode leaves you with more clarity about what actually helps children become skilled, joyful readers. If today's conversation was helpful, I'd be so grateful if you would follow the show. Leave a quick five star rating or review and share this episode with a friend or teacher or another parent who cares deeply about kids. Those small actions make a big difference in helping this work reach more families. You can also find resources, deep dives and practical tools for families by subscribing to my free weekly substack newsletter at katiemegrian.substack.com And you can connect with me on Instagram thereadingsymphony Until next time, take care. And remember, reading doesn't happen by accident. It develops when the right parts come together.