Saint Louis Public Schools’ new phonics programs showed early promise in their first year, especially in elementary grades, but more meaningful results will likely need a few more years to emerge.
For the past school year, SLPS used three programs from the 95 Percent Group as a supplement to its existing reading curriculum. For kindergarten through fifth grade, students now have daily, 30-minute lessons focused on phonics, a method of teaching reading and writing that links sounds with their letters or letter combinations, giving students the foundation for decoding written language. For sixth through eighth grade, students spend 10 minutes a day on morphological awareness—understanding the structure of words and how they are formed from roots, prefixes, and suffixes—and another 10 minutes on syllable structures, vowel sounds, and syllable division rules.
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“It’s clear based on our data that we, at least as a system over the last five or six years, have been pretty stagnant,” Chief of Schools Allison Deno tells SLM. “So we need to do something different if we’re going to expect a different outcome.”
Deno describes phonics as the building blocks for reading comprehension. “If you don’t have those core skills and the ability to decode, then you don’t ever become a solid reader, and so many of our students never got that instruction,” she says.
The district is measuring progress using the student growth percentile, which gauges how much a student’s academic performance improves compared to peers who started at a similar level; a percentile of 50 represents typical growth. From the 2023-24 school year to the 2025-26 one, the share of students hitting the benchmark increased by 4 percentage points in kindergarten, 3 percentage points in first grade, 7 percentage points in second grade, and at least 1 percentage point in third and fourth grades. Results for grades five through eight were mixed. (The district used 2023-24 as its baseline since it was piloting multiple phonics programs in 2024-25.) Yet even with those gains, fewer than half of early-grade students cleared the bar for typical growth: 46 percent in kindergarten, 28 percent in first grade, and 30 percent in second grade.
In short: More early-grade students are keeping pace with or outgrowing their peers—and while that’s fewer than half so far, it’s up from the district’s baseline.
Early literacy assessments for students in kindergarten through second grade connect explicitly to the skills students are taught, whereas assessments in later grades are much more comprehension based. If a student isn’t comprehending written material, it’s harder to pinpoint where the underlying skills broke down. With these new phonics programs, “we expect to see that those comprehension scores for students increase over time,” Deno says.
A seminal study from 2011 that tracked nearly 4,000 students found that those who aren’t reading proficiently by third grade are four times more likely not to graduate from high school on time, and poverty compounds the issue. But reading proficiency narrows the divide: poor students who do read proficiently by third grade graduate at rates closer to their wealthier peers.
While researchers at Opportunity Insights, a Harvard University–affiliated economic mobility research center, haven’t studied early literacy approaches as standalone drivers of economic mobility, their work shows that children’s early environments matter greatly for long-term outcomes. Measures of school quality—alongside other neighborhood-level characteristics like lower poverty concentration and higher levels of social capital—tend to be associated with places that produce upward economic mobility. Early literacy can be understood as one of many factors that contribute to early skill development and children’s experiences in school, both of which are linked to long-term opportunity.
The Saint Louis Public School district is making its phonics push amid a nationwide shift to “science of reading,” a term for decades of research and evidence on what works best for teaching children to read. The previous “balanced literacy” approach folded some phonics into whole-language instruction, which is based on the idea that reading is a natural process. The science of reading instead calls for “structured literacy” with explicit, systematic instruction on foundational skills like phonics. Most states have passed science of reading laws in recent years. Missouri did so in 2022 and 2025.
Over the 2024-25 school year, the St. Louis district piloted phonics programs from three different organizations to see which would be the most effective, according to board meeting documents. One yielded the most consistent and highest gains and came with the most research backing: the 95 Percent Group. The board has since approved spending as much as $4.34 million in instructional and professional development materials from the 95 Percent Group.
While the district is working to bring more phonics into the schools, the teachers’ union continues to back a different approach, says AFT Local 420 President Ray Cummings: getting kids to read more on their own. “If you don’t increase the amount of independent reading that students do outside of school, they’re never going to read on grade level,” he says. The union has put money behind that belief, funding a pre-K program that pays and trains parents to read aloud to their children as well as library partnerships that get elementary students their own cards and books.
For the district, Deno says a major focus moving forward will be on fidelity—ensuring consistent use of the programs. “If we don’t teach as intended, then we’re not actually delivering the guaranteed and viable curriculum to students and ensuring that kids across the system are having the same high-quality experience,” she says.
While the district is hoping for improved student outcomes on both the district’s internal reading assessments as well as state assessments, it knows any improvements will take time. Says Deno, “We didn’t get to where we are overnight, so we can’t expect overnight change.”
