In 2021, four boys transferred from private schools into Lesli Tompkins's fourth-grade classroom at J.V. Forrestal Elementary in Beacon.

They were "brilliant and eager to learn, and I could have put them in books that would have filled them with new knowledge," recalled Tompkins, who envisioned the boys doing fun projects exploring all manner of ideas.

But there was a problem. "They didn't know how to read," she said.

While these boys could converse like adults, their reading was far below grade level.

The boys had not been taught how to sound out words, especially complicated words like photosynthesis, a common fourth-grade topic. They were part of what some view as a nationwide crisis in which only a third of elementary school students read at grade level.

The news is a little better in New York state, where 53 percent of younger students are considered "proficient" at reading for their grade.

That perceived crisis prompted New York to require public schools this year to certify that their reading curricula comply with the "science of reading," a vast body of research that points to phonics, or sounding out words, as the most efficient way to learn how to read. About 40 states have passed similar laws.

The science of reading conflicts with "whole language" instruction, which dates to the 19th century and Horace Mann, known as the father of American public education. Mann viewed phonics as "soul-deadening." By contrast, whole-language instruction focuses on the pleasure of stories, looking at pictures and enjoying what was thought to be the "natural" process of learning.

But reading is not natural, argued Sarah Holbrook, who trains teachers at SUNY New Paltz's Science of Reading Center. "Language develops naturally. But reading is a manmade phenomenon that has to be taught."

The science of reading has five components: phonemic awareness (recognizing and manipulating sounds), phonics (how letters translate those sounds) and building fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

Focusing on those principles has boosted reading scores in Beacon, said Sagrario Rudecindo-O'Neill, the district's assistant superintendent of curriculum and student support. Two years ago, 37 percent of third graders in Beacon were deemed proficient readers in state testing. Last year, that number rose to 45 percent. Fourth graders increased from 45 percent to 55 percent. Fifth graders went from 35 percent to 54 percent.

Before 2021, Rudecindo-O'Neill said that teachers were using phonics, but in a haphazard way. Today, teachers follow a "structured literacy model" and related initiatives. Students start with the basics, learning how to decode words.

"They're teaching the letters one at a time," Rudecindo-O'Neill said. "They're saying it. They're writing it. They're having opportunities to practice reading the words."

One building block is "phonemic awareness," a child's ability to recognize, pronounce and manipulate the 44 distinct sounds, or phonemes, of the English language. Before children decode letters, they need to hear how elf can become shelf by adding the "sh" sound, and get a feel for how words rhyme and how words like cat, hat, bat, mat, mate, fate and late are different yet share similar sounds.

With that in mind, Stacy Ricci, who has taught kindergarten and prekindergarten at the Garrison School, often starts the day with an "initial phoneme isolation." She might say the word cloud and ask students to repeat. Then they isolate the beginning "c" sound. "We use our hands to make it interactive so they can see it and feel it," she said. They move to another word like catch, showing how it includes three sounds: "c" - "a" - "tch".

Such quick exercises are part of a daily routine to ensure compliance with the state's new reading mandate, said Allison Emig, the Garrison principal. "In years past, we weren't always doing this every single day," she said. Last year, 78 percent of Garrison's students tested as proficient at reading.

Emig added tha...