5 Strategies to Address the Education Crisis

Literacy According to Lisa #2

Feb 14, 2025

Editor’s Note: Lisa Schonhoff is a wife, mother of 4 school-aged children, and a teacher with over 20 years of experience in the classroom. As of January 2025, she is a Nebraska State Board of Education member.

Lisa is a bona fide literacy expert, not in the “I had a grant to study this” kind of way, but rather in a “I have been coaching teachers on how to teach reading for decades” kind of way. Literacy needs to be the first duty of Nebraska schools, and no one understands the issues better than Lisa.

She has started a blog about literacy on her website, and you can follow it here:

https://www.lisafornebraska.com/post/literacy-according-to-lisa

Alternatively, you may want to subscribe to this substack (it’s free) to follow along with us.

Installments of her blog are reprinted here with the author’s permission. We recommend opening the links, they are enlightening. -Sue Greenwald, M.D.

Lisa’s Top 5 Strategies for Solving our Education Crisis:

My Views are my own. By Lisa Schonhoff, Ed.S.

photo credit: blockbluelight.com

With NAEP (National Assessment of Education Progress) scores being posted last week, I decided this is a pertinent time to discuss my top five strategies for solving the education crisis our country is facing. While there have been many studies and articles published over the past several decades, the Policy Circle provides well-rounded context to show that “Over the past few decades, increases in educational spending have not led to improved educational outcomes, nor have they closed achievement gaps.”

I will be the first to acknowledge that there are numerous social nuances contributing to these numbers, such as the drastic increase in students in one parent households, to children being raised on screens, to the influx of students who speak languages other than English in the home. My top five strategies are based on what can be done in schools with very little expense.

I’ll begin with 5 and do a countdown.

5: Get Behaviors Under Control

The majority of teachers who are leaving the field cite the escalation of student behaviors as a primary reason. Our schools have become increasingly chaotic over my time as an educator.

One child is allowed to cuss, spit, throw furniture, bite, kick, and hit, while the teacher is required to remove the rest of the class and disburse the rest of the students to other classrooms until the disruptive child has calmed down. The education of the entire class is disturbed along with all the classrooms that those students had to be disbursed to, while there are little to no consequences for the disruptive student.

This type of classroom management is a result of PBIS (Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports) being implemented in schools across our state and nation, accompanied by ongoing training by the Crisis Prevention Institute. These soft disciplinary approaches are proving to have a negative impact in classrooms across our nation.

Let’s get back to the basics with Harry Wong’s tried and true methodology…clear, high, and consistent expectations. Teachers are there to teach, not to deal with excessively disruptive behaviors. Those need to be handled by the parents in partnership with school administrators.

4. Graduate Educators Who Are Prepared

Our college Education Preparation Programs (EPPs) are failing our educators. It is clear that teachers coming out of our universities are not prepared to teach kids to read – and haven’t been for as long as I have been an educator. I am speaking from experience and observation.

I learned everything I know on the job. As a result of our faltering universities, we operate under the false premise that extremely costly curriculum companies can train our teachers and teach our students. I believe it’s clear by now that this model is not working.

We must have highly qualified instructional leaders in every single building that are capable of delivering ongoing training and feedback to our educators. As for our universities, I recommend looking into the work that the University of Florida has implemented.

3. Limit Screen Time. There is NO Substitute for Reading Books

With the advancement of technology in the past couple decades, our children are increasingly exposed to digital devices throughout their days.

When schools shut down in 2020, the federal government disbursed emergency relief funds to schools across our nation for purchasing technology that would allow 1:1 devices in our schools. There are a great deal of studies that have come out on the detrimental impact that blue light has on the developing brain in children.

Sleep, learning problems, mental health, eye health, and weight gain are listed in this article. There is significant evidence that children build reading stamina and comprehension when reading real books. There is very little downside to minimizing screen time within the school day.

2. Focus on the Four Universal Domains of Language.

Meeting the language needs in our classrooms is becoming increasingly difficult. We have a quickly growing demographic of students who speak a language other than English in the home. Our teachers must be equipped with strategies that help students acquire the listening, speaking, reading, and writing domains of the English language.

On a positive note, ALL kids benefit from these strategies. Even native English speakers are struggling more with all four language domains as a result of being read to less by distracted parents, as students increasingly come from single parent households. Also, they are engaging less in personal interactions due to increased technology.

1. Get back to the Basics of Phonics.

The good news is that phonics is coming back, but why did it go away in the first place?

Proficiency scores were declining and education experts published articles like this in 1999 (from the non-profit Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development): Whole Language Works: Sixty Years of Research. This organization is now using the exact same narrative as they promote Science of Reading. The point is the industry groups are always promoting the next thing. There is nothing new.

However, there is a ton of great work coming out as a result of the Science of Reading, such as systematic phonics. This is a result of a body of research we have had access to all along, but was largely ignored. Let’s make sure we learn from our mistakes.

There are many successful educators who understand the continuum of literacy instruction. Let’s call on them to ensure systematic phonics is being taught within our school districts (K-3) instead of giving millions of tax dollars to curriculum makers while hoping they solve all of our problems for us.

Oh, and bring back cursive!

How Did We Get Here?

To gain an understanding of what is and isn’t working in our education system, it’s imperative to look at a timeline of major events throughout our history. These are the events that stand out to me as I write. Click on the following links to learn more.

1965 Launch of federal Head Start program

1979 U.S. Department of Education is established as cabinet-level agency (View spending here)

2002 Enactment of No Child Left Behind (NCLB)

2003 Adoption of the Whole Language Approach to Teaching Reading

2009 Launch of the Common Core State Standards Initiative

2015 Enactment of Every Student Succeeds (ESSA)

2020 Passage of Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act (ESSER Funds)

Nebraska Literacy Project

In 2024, the Nebraska Dept. of Education received $55 million of state and federal grant money to put toward a literacy project. On February 7, 2025, at my second ever State Board of Education meeting, we took a vote on the plan to implement this project. I was the only board member who voted against it.

I agree wholeheartedly with the goals of ramping up literacy in Nebraska. Literacy has been my heart and soul and life’s work. It is the reason I ran for this position. I was hoping to delay the vote long enough to ensure effective implementation.

As a new board member, I was forced to vote on the final product without having been part of the discussion that led to it. I hope to be able to influence its implementation, as there were some parts that still concern me.

A good chunk of the funding is allocated to pre-K instruction. How will this be implemented since Nebraska does not have universal preschool? If we instituted universal preschool, it would be unsustainable to continue once the grant money ran out. Our tax base would not support it.

Also, there has been solid research showing that government-funded preschool has failed to raise achievement rates beyond fourth grade. Head Start is an example. For best results, we need to focus on K-3. While I believe many of my other board members agree with that, the plan says otherwise.

Another concern I have is regarding the project’s focus on Regional Instructional Coaches. I see this as building a new bureaucracy through the ESU’s that may be redundant. I would prefer to see the grant money spent in the schools, rather than the ESU’s. Instructional coaches are only useful if they are in the school building.

We need to build leadership capacity utilizing the best-of-the-best coaches who are already in the school buildings. We have those dedicated educators now, so we should focus the training on them.

Finally, I am concerned about the focus on using curriculum identified as “High Quality Instructional Materials” (HQIM) that are to be “taught with fidelity.”

What that means is the schools are to purchase a curriculum that is largely online, it’s expensive, and the teachers are not to vary their lessons from that curriculum.

Who decides what constitutes High Quality?

One example of the plan’s HQIM is Amplify: CKLA, which has been unpopular with many parents and teachers in Nebraska. It has students reading only passages or excerpts from books, often from screens, rather than reading actual books. See my #3 “strategy for success;” more books, less screens.

Also, when a school purchases one of these online curriculums, the sales vendors come to train the teachers in its use. In practice, the salespeople, who have never taught in our schools, become the de-facto reading coaches.

The best teachers are those who know when to pivot from the curriculum to spark the interest of their students. “Fidelity” to the curriculum does not allow for that. I believe that well-written and concise state standards for Language Arts would provide the direction and flexibility that teachers need; more so than a pre-chosen curriculum.

This graphic summarizes the tenets of the Nebraska Literacy Project as accepted. I am thrilled that literacy has become the primary goal of the Nebraska Department of Education and the Nebraska State Board of Education, and I look forward to using my classroom experience to influence the implementation in a way that most benefits Nebraska teachers and students.