Shocked by the Covid-Caused Decline in Child Literacy, Two Former Educators Took Matters into Their Own Hands

Former school administrator Mary Cantwell couldn’t believe her ears when a single mother of two confided that her first-grader had only just begun to recognize all 26 capital letters in the alphabet this year.

In explaining how her child ended up so far behind, the Pennsylvania mother described the inadequate reading and writing instruction she had received in kindergarten during the pandemic. One entire Zoom class was dedicated to finding a household item that begins with the letter “B” and presenting it to the class. There were 100 kids in the session.

Desperate to reverse her child’s learning loss, the mom reached out to Enriched Literacy Education, a New York City–based start-up, founded by Cantwell and former teacher Brooke Ooten that provides supplementary early-literacy curricula. Enriched has a team of teachers who offer virtual and in-person programming to low-income children ages two to ten, partly in partnership with the I Have a Dream foundation, a fellow education nonprofit, and partly with privately subsidized clientele.

Enriched Literacy Education is attempting to bridge the literacy gap widened by prolonged K–12 closures and masking rules, cutting through the red tape of public education to offer effective private solutions. Cantwell and Ooten wish they could say the Pennsylvania mom is an isolated case, but sadly, business has been booming this year because so many children across the country are at least a grade level behind and failing in core subjects such as English and math, the founders told National Review.

The company now works with communities in Dallas, Los Angeles Idaho, east Harlem, Palm Beach, Greenwich, Chelsea, and Miami. The performance lag is even worse in underprivileged areas.

The U.S. education system’s gradual shift away from phonics, solidified by Covid-19, is behind the reading crisis, according to the duo.

Phonic is the recognition of symbol/sound correspondence. It is the understanding that there are 26 letters in the alphabet that make 44 unique sounds that must be taught explicitly and intentionally in sequence, they said. The process is kinesthetic, meaning that children mentally register the letters and words by physically mouthing them.

“This cannot be learned through osmosis,” Cantwell said.

That’s how this K–2 age group has been hardest hit by Covid-19 learning loss: They have not been in school when phonics is taught in Pre-K and kindergarten, or they can’t see their teachers face because of masks. They didn’t learn, for example, how to form the letter O with their mouth and teeth.

Mayor Eric Adams recently reneged on his promise to unmask New York City toddlers in public day care, Ooten noted. “Those are formative years for phonics and language acquisition, facial expression, and communication,” she added.

With another new variant on the horizon, attendance rates in schools have been suffering because the pandemic solidified the perception that school is now optional, she said. In Los Angeles United School District, 46 percent of students are chronically absent, the Los Angeles Times reported in March.

The pair have one client, a child at a select gifted-and-talented school in NYC, whose father stopped sending him to school because it was freezing in the classroom, thanks to the city’s open-window policy.

The phonics-based approach championed by Cantwell and Ooten works for kids from all socioeconomic and linguistic backgrounds, they said. The pair recently onboarded 27 first-graders in Idaho, many of whom are the children of migrant farm workers who couldn’t write basic words, such as “cup,” let alone a full sentence. After going through the Enriched program, however, these kids are on grade level and back on track, they claim.

Even before the pandemic, the public schools began to pivot away from phonics and toward whole-language learning, which teaches children to read by recognizing words as whole pieces of language rather than breaking them down into letters and combinations of letters.

But while reading and math scores have been in decline since 2010, Covid-19 exacerbated that trend, Cantwell and Ooten believe. “The skills you were supposed to be learning in pre-K and kindergarten, well, they’re learning them in first and second grade,” Ooten said.

While time away from the classroom certainly hurt kids, the problem is made worse because teachers are now spending precious time on social-emotional learning, rather than focusing on the skill acquisition that students missed during the pandemic.

“They’ve been trying to level the playing field. There are great disparities in American society so the idea is that by relating to learners, getting on their levels, not reading dry boring phonics, we will get them to read books about people who look like them and talk like them,” Ooten said.

While Cantwell said it’s important to strike a balance, “skills have fallen by the wayside, which is why we started our company: to get back to traditional skills to teach children.”

“They haven’t been taught for a long time, and Covid-19 completely blew this open. Parents are home so they’re watching what goes on in a zoom class,” she said.

“Virtual learning puts the burden on parents and so many of these parents aren’t educated themselves,” Cantwell said. She said she’s interacted with children through Enriched who have attended their entire school day from an iPhone in a kitchen, in cars, in shopping malls, etc.

While most businesses and individuals are moving on from Covid, many schoolchildren nationwide can’t move on because they’re too far behind. “Children are the first to suffer and the last to get help,” Cantwell said.