What America Can Learn from England’s Education Revolution

F or generations, Americans have had a predictable response when students in other countries significantly outperform them on tests: But they’re different.

Singapore is a tiny city-state. Finland is small and relatively homogeneous. Japan has a very different culture, and so does South Korea. Shanghai isn’t even a country! Americans have simply never seemed to fret much about the mediocrity of so many U.S. schools.

England, however, is harder to explain away. It’s a large, diverse democracy that shares our native language. It has significant rates of immigration and stubborn socioeconomic inequality. Its education system, meanwhile, is defined by many of the same debates, pathologies, and issues of poor performance that have bedeviled the United States. Yet, over the past 15 years, England has engineered impressive improvements in student outcomes that are attracting global attention.

Every three years, the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests the ability of 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics, and science across more than 90 countries. The latest results arrived this month and showed that students in England are among the world’s strongest performers in these subjects — even as student achievement across much of the developed world continues to decline. By contrast, U.S. reading scores fell sharply and are now among the lowest ever recorded for American students. This isn’t an isolated result. The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), an international assessment of younger children’s reading achievement, showed that England rose from tenth place in 2011 to eighth in 2016 and fourth in 2021 while U.S. performance remained broadly flat over the same time period. Most encouragingly, some of the greatest improvements were among England’s lowest-performing pupils.

Clearly, something is working in English schools. Decades of polling has shown that Americans have a miserable opinion of public education (although they often exempt their children’s schools and teachers from that harsh judgment). England’s reforms provide a clear example that America shouldn’t ignore.

Like the U.S., England endured decades of “reading wars.” Eventually, it adopted an approach called “synthetic phonics,” which teaches young children to read by learning individual letter sounds and combining them to form whole words. More pertinently, it introduced a phonics screening check for every child at the end of the first year of school to ensure that schools were teaching children to read using systematic phonics and to prevent struggling readers from slipping through the cracks. The percentage of six-year-olds meeting expected standards rose from 58 percent in 2012 to 82 percent in 2018 — compelling evidence that these reforms are bearing fruit.

America has begun to embrace a new seriousness about literacy. The rise of the so-called “science of reading” movement has led dozens of states to adopt explicit, systematic reading instruction and abandon ineffective practices such as teaching children to guess unfamiliar words using pictures and contextual clues. But there is a danger that Americans will learn only half of England’s lesson. Namely, that American educators have oversimplified reading instruction. Phonics is just the starting line. For children to truly understand what they read, schools must, year after year, emphasize vocabulary, offer a rich curriculum, and familiarize them with the world.

Ironically, the American scholar E. D. Hirsch Jr. has been a major influence on England’s approach. For decades, in books such as Cultural Literacy and The Schools We Need, Hirsch has argued that knowledge is not the enemy of critical thinking or reading comprehension but rather a prerequisite for both. Children from knowledge-rich homes arrive at school with an enormous, largely invisible advantage. Schools that do not ensure that children from low-income families acquire that wide range of knowledge across a broad curriculum are functionally imposing illiteracy on them.

Hirsch’s work, which has long been controversial in the U.S., helped shape England’s reforms. The nation’s 2014 National Curriculum put subject knowledge back at the center of schooling while generally granting schools considerable freedom over teaching methods. In essence, England began to treat reading as both a phonics code to be mastered and a body of knowledge to be taught and shared.

There is even something resembling a natural experiment occurring within the United Kingdom. England, Scotland, and Wales share a language, an island, deep historical and cultural ties, and broadly similar economic circumstances. But their education policies diverged after 2010. England began to emphasize knowledge, phonics, academic standards, autonomy, and accountability. Scotland adopted its Curriculum for Excellence, which focused on broad capacities and competencies rather than specified knowledge. Wales trod a similar path. Their subsequent educational trajectories have diverged markedly.

England’s results now speak for themselves. There is much that the United States can learn from its success. If reading comprehension depends upon shared knowledge, then phonics is necessary but insufficient: a curriculum rich in history, science, literature, geography, art, and music are all crucial to reading instruction. They contribute to the store of knowledge and vocabulary that allows children to read and comprehend increasingly sophisticated texts.

Without a national education system — and with 50 state systems, more than 100,000 public school districts, and a strong tradition of local control — America has an opportunity to test what works. States can pursue the same kind of instructional coherence that has led to England’s noteworthy results.

One state may already be close. Texas has spent the past several years developing an approach to education inspired by England. Its reading reforms emphasize phonics, but its state-approved instructional materials, knowledge-rich curriculum, academic standards, student assessments, and reforms to teacher preparation programs increasingly reflect a common premise: Knowledge is cumulative, and what children learn in one grade should prepare them to understand what they encounter in the next.

Texas’s example shows that federalism need not condemn American education to incoherence and mediocrity. A state can decide what children should know, encourage the adoption of high-quality curriculum materials, and prepare teachers to use them effectively while ensuring that assessment and accountability reinforce rather than undermine those choices. That may be England’s most important lesson for America. It did not successfully reform education because of a single program, pedagogical technique, or ministerial initiative. Rather, it changed things by taking a set of ideas about how children learn seriously enough to turn them into public policy — and by rigorously sticking with those ideas long enough for them to reach classrooms.

There is a pleasing irony in this. England learned some of its most important lessons from American research on reading and the work of American scholar E. D. Hirsch Jr. England then demonstrated what can happen when those ideas are pursued coherently, patiently, and at scale.

America need not become England. But its states could do worse than relearn some of the lessons Americans taught the English in the first place.