Why Should Delaware Care?
The ability to read proficiently is foundational for success as an adult, particularly as the economy becomes increasingly complex. But, for years, Delaware students have scored poorly on basic reading assessments. In response, one educator in the Red Clay School District is implementing a curriculum that goes back to the basics of sounding out words.
Maddie Geller remembers how her childhood reading books would sometimes show detailed pictures of an orange or black cat. If she didn’t know how to read words, such as orange or black, she could look at the picture and guess a sentence based on the context of the image.
“It would be like, ‘Look at the orange cat. Look at the black cat. Look at the yellow cat,’” she said. “But you didn’t actually know how to read the words yellow, orange or black.”
Learning to read through the contextual clues of images became popularized in the 1970s, but recent research has shown that that system is not optimal. As the journal Education Week has reported, context reading can lower the chance of children being able to recognize a word “more quickly the next time they see it.”
Geller today advocates for teaching kids to read by sounding out a word. She does so at Lewis Elementary in Wilmington as a reading specialist, where for years she has used donated dollars to purchase what are called decodable books that focus on sounding out words.
And she says she has seen students’ confidence blossom after learning to piece together letters into words and words into sentences.
Her work has also attracted the attention of Delaware’s governor.
During his State of the State address in April, Gov. Matt Meyer called Geller a teacher who goes “above and beyond” to serve her students, noting her efforts to raise money for decodable books.
In the speech, he also spoke about his then-proposed budget, which included $3 million for an initiative that would send money directly to teachers and other educators to spend where they believe it is needed most in classrooms.
Ultimately, state funding for the initiative was included in Delaware’s final budget, which became law in June.
Now, the state is finalizing a contract with a vendor to run the new program and to create an “e-commerce-like platform for Delaware teachers to craft project descriptions for literacy-related projects,” according to contract documents.
The documents further state that any teacher request will likely be limited to $750.
Delaware Department of Education spokesperson Alison May said in an email to Spotlight Delaware that the new money will be rolled out to teachers in the fall on a first-come, first-served basis.
Teachers will not be required to submit a proposal to access the money, according to May.
In an email sent after this story published, May said the rollout of the program “will prioritize teachers working in schools with the lowest literacy rates or designated as needing improvement.”
Beyond the $3 million from taxpayers, the state also hopes to get another $3 million for the initiative from private donors.
Geller called the initiative “vitally important,” saying she will look into what funds are available.
A ‘literacy emergency’?
The call to give educators more flexibility comes at a time when Delaware recorded another year of test scores that, according to Secretary of Education Cindy Marten, “no one should be satisfied with.”
According to the 2024-25 results from a state standardized test released last month, a total of 41% of third graders through eighth graders are proficient at reading. Just 34% of them are math proficient.
The dismal scores followed results earlier this year for Delaware from the National Assessment on Educational Progress – also known as the nation’s report card – that showed a continued decline in students’ proficiency rates.
Following the release of the report card, Meyer in February declared a “literacy emergency” in the state.
“I understand firsthand that literacy and mathematics aptitude must go hand-in-hand if we want our kids, and our state, to prosper,” Meyer said in a statement at the time.
‘Cracking the code’
Geller’s decodable books are part of what many education advocates call a “science of reading” approach, which they say synthesizes data from scientific studies that show students learn best when focusing on sounding out words, as well as a set of other techniques.
“We’re teaching skills in a specific order that builds on each other and gives students the kind of cracking the code, of being able to decode and actually sound out the text,” Geller said.
The science of reading has become a priority for Delaware education. In August 2022, then-Gov. John Carney signed House Bill 304 into law, which required all public school students in kindergarten through third grade to participate in a universal reading screening three times a year in order to identify potential reading challenges for early intervention.
Since then, the science of reading has become widely accepted by the state and decodable books are used throughout the Red Clay Consolidated School District where Geller works.
Still, as a reading specialist, Geller said she needs to rely on private donations to purchase the necessary materials. She said that is because she teaches kids of various ages, which means she needs a wider array of materials than teachers who work in a single classroom.
“I have been working on my fiction and then adding my nonfiction and those decodable texts, because I saw that nonfiction was a need for my older readers,” she said.
Geller also noted that multiple people living near the Lewis Elementary School have donated to her project, stating that neighbors “want to feel connected to public education and feel like they can volunteer.”
In a statement to Spotlight Delaware, Meyer praised Geller’s decision to go “out of her way to order decodable books so her students could learn to read with confidence.”
“Maddie noticed her kids were struggling with phonics and didn’t wait around for someone else to fix it,” he said.
