The title of the report from the National Council on Teacher Quality reflects the group’s discouraging findings: “What Education Schools Aren’t Teaching about Reading and What Elementary Teachers Aren’t Learning.” The authors looked at a sample of class syllabuses and textbooks from 72 elementary education programs that provide a representative sample of such institutions nationwide. The analysis focused specifically on required reading courses for students who aspired to teach in kindergarten through fifth grade; it looked at whether the courses taught the five components of effective reading instruction (as identified by the National Reading Panel’s 2000 report): phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

Of the 72 institutions, only 11 were teaching all five components. More than twice as many—23 institutions—included none of the components in their reading courses. Among the report’s other findings:

■  Even courses that claimed to provide a balanced approach to reading ignored the science of reading. Of the 93 courses that professed to promote an approach balancing the best from whole language with an emphasis on decoding, only 9 percent included any time on teaching the science of reading.

■  Nationally accredited schools were no more likely to teach the science of reading than unaccredited schools.

■ Phonics was the most frequently taught of the five components, but even so, it was taught in only one in seven reading courses.

■ Many education school courses reflected low expectations, with little evidence of college-level work. In one sample of courses, for example, only 11 percent required any sort of research paper. A much more common assignment was a “literacy memoir” in which the students reflected on their own process of learning to read.

■  The quality of most reading textbooks was poor, and they included little or no hard science. Of the 226 texts that were used in different classes, the authors say only four incorporated the science of reading, and those books were used in only 11 courses. With such a wide variety of textbooks, a related problem was the lack of a “seminal” text that should be essential reading in the field.

The report’s recommendations, which include ideas for everyone from states to textbook publishers, focus on getting the science of reading to become “absorbed into mainstream thinking and practice.” The recommendations are, in brief:

■  States need to develop both strong reading standards and licensing tests based on those standards.

■  Membership organizations should not accredit schools that do not teach the science of reading.

■  The federal government should require elementary teachers to pass a test in reading to become “highly qualified.”

■  Textbook publishers need to identify legitimate experts in the field and hire them to develop and write better reading textbooks.

■  Education schools need to build better faculty expertise in reading.

Now that there is agreement on what to include in an effective reading program, the report concludes, the question becomes how to make sure future teachers learn those basic components.

The full report is available online at http://www.nctq.org/.