Dive Brief:
- After Greater Holy Temple Christian Academy in Milwaukee switched to the structured literacy approach based in the science of reading, the proportion of 1st graders meeting proficiency in foundational reading skills tripled during the 2025-26 school year, from 27% to 79%. Kindergartners’ letter-sound accuracy more than tripled from 25% to 87%, according to leaders at the private school.
- The school paired daily multisensory instruction with benchmark assessments and decodable texts aligned to the skill level of each student, an approach that Jake Daggett, director of K-5 English/language arts, notes is broadly required in at least 33 states.
- Greater Holy Temple specifically used a model based on the Orton-Gillingham approach to literacy, which was developed in the 1930s by Dr. Samuel Orton, a physician who broke ground in the study of learning disabilities like dyslexia, and Anna Gillingham, an educator and psychologist. Doing so, Daggett said, enabled educators to manage “little chunks [of learning] that instantly build achievement,” such as learning a given sound, or how to write or read a word or phrase.
Dive Insight:
“Structured literacy manages these chunks in a way that our brain processes them,” he added. “It helped the teachers see their impact. When the teachers can see them learning these sounds week by week, everyone is motivated to continue.”
To succeed with such an approach, a school needs to hone its strategic learning goals and not try to accomplish multiple things at once, Daggett said.
“You have to figure out what is the first step, and then you have to find the capacity to do the next one,” he said. “You have to learn the general trajectory of what the grade level should be looking like,” then plan lessons day by day, in which, for example, “the focus might be loudly repeating a vowel sound.”
Understanding how the brain learns to read step-by-step means starting with solving words in the first year, then moving on to fluency, and then reaching the level of comprehension, Daggett said.
The school’s improvements occurred against the backdrop of a city with “generations of systemic racism and underachievement, the largest Black-White achievement gap in the country,” said Maurice Thomas, COO at Greater Holy Temple.
“We still have young teachers developing their sense of literacy and where students need to go.” That requires “working with teachers to understand how the brain is developing in each child,” so they can start with straightforward decoding and then move on to trickier words, he said.
Laying the foundation in the early grades boosts the chances that 4th and 5th graders will make the adjustment to figuring out “long, multisyllabic words where the vowels don’t act the way you told me they did in 1st grade,” Daggett added.
The other element Daggett believes has been key to the improvements is the fact that his role exists in the first place.
“The choice to bring someone like me in allows for intense study and mastery of this type of teaching,” he said. “It allows for a very focused goal and expectation. Literacy means access to society, to science, to your favorite social studies topic. To give a salary to someone like me and say, ‘this is your job’ — a lot of places do not currently have that in place.”
