Longview’s Phonics Bet Enters Year Five at 44 Percent

Year five of Longview Public Schools’ science-based reading curriculum is underway in 2026-27, and 44 percent of students met the state English language arts standard in the last two published years.

The Cowlitz County district of 6,413 students dropped balanced literacy in 2022-23. Washington later wrote a similar reading rule into law, without a third-grade retention gate and without forcing Longview to buy new books.

Longview Bet on Phonics Before the State Did

On Feb. 23, 2024, the district was already in year two of a reading program built on research about how the brain handles print. Ann Valanzuolo was then executive director of curriculum and instruction. She drew a hard line between talking and reading.

Speaking, she said, is picked up from the people around a child. Reading is not. “Reading has to be taught,” she said.

The method Longview left is balanced literacy, a 1990s hybrid that mixed some phonics with context clues and independent practice. Definitions of that hybrid have always been loose. In many rooms it included three-cueing, in which a child looks at a first letter and a picture, then guesses a word that might fit.

“In real life, most of the text we read doesn’t have pictures, so if you don’t learn how to read the word, you’re going to be in trouble when you get to third grade,” Valanzuolo said.

Phonics drills that tie letters to sounds date to 1690. Whole-word memorization got a public boost in the mid-1800s from Horace Mann, then Massachusetts’s education secretary. By around 2018, the old fight was back, and Longview joined districts that were dumping cueing for a planned phonics sequence. Olympia did not yet require that shift.

Two Material Sets, One Daily Routine

Elementary classes use two complementary sets of materials. One set drills foundational skills such as letter shapes, letter sounds, and phonics. The other uses themed units so children practice reading and writing while they also learn science and other content, including space and the heart.

The district has not published the vendor names in the materials reviewed for this account. The daily pattern is explicit anyway, and it is the opposite of handing a child a picture book and hoping the word comes.

HOW A LONGVIEW READING BLOCK IS BUILT

• Letters first: Children learn what a letter looks like and what sound it makes before they are asked to guess from pictures.
• Handwriting with sound: Each letter is written as it is learned, because the motor act is treated as part of memory.
• Magnetic building: Students push letter tiles into words they have been taught, a multisensory step before connected text.
• Decodable pages: They then read short texts that use the letter patterns already taught, not a random trade book.
• Knowledge units: Those texts sit inside larger topics, so a child who can sound out a word also has something to attach it to.

Sentence structure and figurative language come later, once the print code is not the whole job. “It’s one thing to be able to read the words, but it’s not going to do you any good if you don’t know what it means,” Valanzuolo said. A passage about a topic a child already knows, she said, is easier than a passage about a blank.

What Teachers Saw in Year Two

Kristie Wall is principal of Robert Gray Elementary. In February 2024 she was not waiting on the state test to decide whether the rooms felt different. She pointed to writing output, longer sentences, and children putting their own ideas on paper next to the unit topic.

My greatest gain I’ve seen is that students are writing more. They’re writing their ideas down, they’re writing longer sentences. They’re putting their own ideas, connected to the learning topic, on paper.

Kristie Wall, Principal, Robert Gray Elementary

Staff also described cleaner pronunciation, stronger spelling, more written work, and longer attention during lessons. The new materials were harder at first. Jodie Wygant is a literacy coach at Robert Gray. “At first it’s all so hard and now it’s getting easier,” she said. “And so now they’re willing to give it a little more.”

Wall called teacher learning the tax on any adoption. A teacher cannot read a full-year program before day one, she said, so year one is survival and year two is when the work “really comes alive.” Kids, she added, were starting to ask questions because they wanted to learn, “a new fire of curiosity” that made teachers glad to come in.

Wygant put the stakes outside the reading block. “In all areas, you are needing to read in order to understand,” she said. “We grow by reading. We learn by reading. We have to fill out job applications.” Wall tied the same point to math word problems and to jobs in Longview after graduation.

Wall also said it was still too early, in that second year, to know what the curriculum would do to state scores. That caution aged better than the classroom cheer.

The 44 Percent That Has Not Moved

Longview’s own 2024-25 community report published Smarter Balanced results for 2022-23, the first year of the new reading work. Districtwide, 44 percent of tested students met the English language arts standard. Math sat at 31 percent. OSPI reading figures for 2023-24 were again 44 percent.

SHARE MEETING THE 2022-23 STATE STANDARD

Third through fifth grade, the first state-tested window after early phonics, ran below the district average: 38, 34, and 40 percent in English. Middle school and grade 10 pulled the combined figure up. Typical growth in English, a separate i-Ready-style measure in the same report, was 56 percent districtwide, which is not the same as meeting the state bar.

District planning materials used with schools in 2024-25 set a different destination: 8 in 10 students proficient on the ELA Smarter Balanced test, including 8 in 10 in grades 3-5, and 8 in 10 pre-K through grade 2 at or above the Acadience reading composite. Forty-four percent is just over half of that 80 percent target. The same handbook said students were posting academic gains and then admitted the district still faced “the statewide challenge to achieve the targeted progress in math and reading improvement.”

THE SCOREBOARD AROUND THE BET

• District ELA: 44 percent met standard in 2022-23 and 44 percent on OSPI reading in 2023-24.
• Local target: 8 in 10 proficient on ELA, including in grades 3-5.
• National check: