Displaced by Questionable Policy: The Disappearance of Children’s Literature from the Teacher Education Curriculum

Over the past three decades (1995–2025), state legislatures and departments of education have accelerated mandates governing reading instruction in educator preparation programs. These mandates have resulted in severe policy shifts in all 50 states. More specifically, changes to policy appear to have led to the decline or elimination of standalone children’s literature courses. What appears to be mandates driven by science of reading advocates and degree credit constraints, educator preparation programs (EPP) systematically eliminated the children’s literature requirements for K-5 teachers and replaced them with structured literacy courses. Further, the shift toward a broader, more encompassing humanistic literary text instruction— which has been embedded into methods subunits or high-stakes assessment preparation—is still an elimination of critical knowledge teachers need to be effective teachers of reading. Through a 50-state study of children’s literature policy within the United States, the findings from this policy study yielded the following three results: (a) Only 2% of all teacher education programs in the United States have a standalone children’s literature course requirement for teacher licensure; (b) 4% of all teacher education programs in the United States have children’s literature embedded into other EPP coursework; and (c) 94% of EPP programs across the United States have no children’s literature requirement for graduation or state licensure. Based on these findings, we outline three recommendations in this study for policy and EPP curriculum design that reconciles explicit foundational skills instruction with knowledge of books and authentic text engagement.