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Influential literacy expert Lucy Calkins is changing her views.

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Influential literacy expert Lucy Calkins is changing her views.

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by Emily hanford
Oct. 16, 2020

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Influential literacy expert Lucy Calkins is changing her views

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In a major shift, the controversial figure in the fight over how to teach reading now says that beginning readers should focus on sounding out words, according to a document obtained by APM Reports.

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What the Words Say:  Many kids struggle with reading - and children of color are far less likely to get the help they need.

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What the Words Say:  Many kids struggle with reading - and children of color are far less likely to get the help they need.

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by Emily Hanford
Aug. 6, 2020

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Listen to this audio documentary on the Educate podcast. Subscribe now.

Sonya Thomas knew something wasn't right with her son C.J. He was in first grade and he was struggling with reading. "Something was going on with him, but I could not figure it out," she said.

Teachers and school officials told her that C.J. was behind but would catch up. They told Sonya to read to him at home. But she did read to him. C.J. liked the Veggie Tales stories and "The Big Friendly Giant" by Roald Dahl. His older sister read the Goosebumps books to him.

C.J. went to Amqui Elementary, a public school in Nashville, Tennessee, where 80 percent of the students were Black or Hispanic and almost all of them were from low-income families. Test scores show most children in the school were struggling with reading. But Sonya didn't know that. She sent C.J. to Amqui because she liked the school and it's where her best friend's son went; her friend picked the kids up after school because Sonya worked late as a nurse.

C.J. is the youngest of Sonya's four kids. The three older ones had no trouble learning to read but something was different with C.J. "I started asking myself, does he have a learning disability?" She sent a handwritten note to the school, requesting that he be tested. Records show the school didn't do it.

Second grade came and went. Then third and fourth grade, and C.J. was still having trouble reading. Sonya didn't know what to do. Tutoring? Private school? Those weren't things she could afford. She was desperate.

And she knew something about how C.J. felt. She'd struggled to learn how to read, too.

As she grew older, she says it wasn't that she couldn't read the words; it's that she didn't know what a lot of the words meant. Not just when she was reading, but when people were talking, too. She noticed it with colleagues at work. "Sometimes when they would have conversations, I didn't know what they were talking about," she said. "I would find myself Googling words." It was embarrassing. She did not want this to happen to C.J.

But the schools kept telling her C.J. was doing fine. His grades were good. He was a well-behaved kid. Then, seventh grade, 2018. C.J. had moved to a new school that year, a public charter school in Nashville. C.J.'s adviser called Sonya in for a meeting. She told her that C.J. was reading on a second-grade level.

"I lost it," Sonya said. "I sobbed." Remembering the moment during an interview brought tears to her eyes.

The adviser said the school would help C.J., and Sonya wanted to believe it. But she'd put her faith in the school system for years, and now she had a seventh grader who was reading on the level of kids nearly half his age.

Sonya was determined to figure out what happened with C.J. - and to help other families in the same situation. "Nobody else should walk away feeling like that," she said.

The kids left behind

There are kids like C.J. all over the country. Learning to read does not come easily to them. Schools tell their parents: Read to them. They'll be OK. But many won't be.

Reading is essential - not just for school success, but for life. When children have trouble learning to read, it can kick off a devastating downward spiral. 1 Struggling readers are more likely to report feeling sad, lonely, angry, anxious and depressed. 2 Their poor reading skills make it hard for them to keep up in other subject areas. They're more likely to have behavior problems, to drop out of school and to end up in the criminal justice system. 3

Despite the high stakes, lots of kids in this country can't read very well. You can see it in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a standardized test given every two years to measure the reading comprehension of American students. More than a third of fourth graders don't read on a basic level.
U.S. fourth-graders' reading levels over time
SOURCE: The National Assessment of Educational Progress. *In 1992 and 1994, testing accommodations were not permitted.

Why are so many children struggling with reading - the most basic, most fundamental academic skill?

It's a question I've been reporting on for several years. What I've found is that reading instruction in many schools is based on a belief that if children are read to a lot, reading should come pretty easily for them. Decades of scientific research on reading shows this isn't true. Some kids learn to read easily, but many children struggle. It doesn't matter how much they are read to or the number of books in their home. They will not become good readers unless they are taught how their written language works. 4

But prevailing approaches to early reading instruction in this country minimize direct instruction. 5 The teacher's role is mainly to guide students, to create an environment that is conducive to learning how to read: setting up reading groups, reading with kids, helping them find books on their reading level.

This approach creates a lot of struggling readers. Some of these struggling readers get the help they need but a lot can depend on their family income, their race and ethnicity, and what kind of school they go to. Family income matters, because if a school isn't teaching a child how to read, there are other options such as paying for tutors or private schools. Race matters, because white children are significantly more likely to go to public schools where more kids are successful with reading; that means when white kids struggle, their reading problems tend to stand out and get attention. 6 And if a child has a reading disability, a white child is much more likely to get special education services.

America's approach to reading instruction is having an especially devastating impact on Black, Hispanic and American Indian children.
U.S. fourth-graders' reading levels by race/ethnicity
SOURCE: The National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2019.

The downward spiral that can start with early reading problems is a source of profound inequality in our society. This could be prevented if more educators and policymakers understood what cognitive scientists have figured out over the past several decades about what's going on when kids struggle with reading.

A proposal for understanding reading difficulty

Wes Hoover is a cognitive psychologist who first got interested in reading when he was a graduate student at the University of Texas in the 1970s. 7 At the time, a big debate was going on among academics about what children need to learn to become good readers. The fight was focused on phonics instruction.

One side said: If kids know how the sounds in words are represented by letters, reading comprehension will follow. Teach kids decoding.

The other side said: If kids are focused on the meaning of what they're reading, they can figure out what the words say. Teach kids comprehension.

"Word recognition is complex. Language comprehension is complex. But the big idea of reading is that if you can master those two complex skills, then you can master reading comprehension."
Wes Hoover

Hoover studied under a professor, Philip Gough, who was trying to figure out the relationship between decoding and comprehension. 8 Gough was particularly interested in why some people have a hard time understanding what they read. He was interested in reading difficulty.

What Gough knew was this: When children start school, the vast majority of them are already quite good at speakingtheir native language. "The average American 6-year-old," he wrote in a paper, "has a mastery of English [that] would be the envy of any college graduate learning English as a second language." 9

But young children don't know how to read most of the words they know how to say. If children can learn to decode, Gough thought, they should be able to comprehend text up to the level at which they can comprehend spoken language.

In 1986, Gough and a colleague, William Tunmer, came up with an equation to describe this idea. They called it the Simple View of Reading. 10

The equation says that a person's ability to comprehend what they read is the product of their decoding skills and their language comprehension ability.

Language comprehension is your ability to understand meaning when someone is talking or when text is read out loud to you.

Decoding is your ability to read printed words quickly and accurately. (Decoding is more commonly referred to now as "word recognition" in the Simple View equation, because scientists have discovered that readers become so skilled they don't have to sound out most of the words they see; they know the words instantly, on sight.) 11

The Simple View doesn't say that reading is simple. It says that reading comprehension can be divided into two parts.

"It's the big idea of reading," Hoover said. "Word recognition is complex. Language comprehension is complex. But the big idea of reading is that if you can master those two complex skills, then you can master reading comprehension. That's the hypothesis."

The hypothesis was first tested and verified in a study Hoover published with Gough in 1990. 12 It's been confirmed in more than 150 studies since. 13 The studies show the only way to be a good reader is to have both good language comprehension ability and good word recognition skills, as this figure illustrates.

The Simple View doesn't say how word recognition or language comprehension skills develop. And it does not say how they should be taught. 14 But it makes clear that the first task of the beginning reader is to learn how to decode the words he or she knows how to say.

Children who don't learn to decode in the early grades can easily grow into adulthood without knowing how to read. I met some of these kids at a juvenile detention facility in Houston. They're being taught to read as part of an ongoing study by researchers at the University of Houston who are investigating the links between reading problems and involvement with the juvenile justice system. 15

Stumped by the words

I visited the Burnett-Bayland Rehabilitation Center in February 2018. It's a large, tan building surrounded by metal fencing. The lobby reminded me of an auto repair shop: worn-out stuffed chairs, old magazines, a chemical odor.

I was led through two large locked doors by a staff member, who took me on a tour. It was all boys, as young as 10. More than 90 percent of them were Black or Hispanic. They walked the halls in blue jumpsuits, their hands clasped behind their backs. We passed the units where they slept on thin plastic mattresses and the isolation room where they were sent when their behavior was out of control. And then we got to a windowless cinderblock room with heavy locked doors on each side. Inside were a table and two green chairs. This was where the boys visited with their families once a week. It was also where some of them were finally being taught how to read.

I sat in on a few of these tutoring sessions. They included short lessons on concepts as basic as how two letters can represent one sound. There were vocabulary building activities. Then the students did some reading. Some of the boys could barely read. 16

"B-l-ee ..." said one boy I'll call Mateo, struggling to read the word "bleak." I wasn't allowed to use the boys' real names or ask why they were here. Mateo was 15 at the time, short and skinny with a shadow of a mustache above his lip.

He was trying to read a story about a man taking a bus ride. Occasionally, he'd successfully sound out and there'd be a flash of recognition. "Woman!" he exclaimed after slowly decoding the word. But it was clear from earlier in the lesson that Mateo didn't know the meaning of a lot of the words he was trying to say: fleet, sneer, gloat. If someone had read the story out loud to him, he wouldn't have understood it all. Mateo had a reading comprehension problem because he was having a hard time with both word recognition and language comprehension.

But if Mateo had been taught how to sound out words earlier in his life, it's likely he would have known the meaning of a lot more words at the age of 15.

That's because of something reading researchers call "Matthew" effects, a term borrowed from the Bible. 17 It's the idea that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Here's how it works in reading.

Let's say you start school, and you get off to a good start learning how to decode words. Now you can read the words you know how to say, and through reading you begin to learn the meaning of words you've never heard before. That's how the rich get richer.

But the opposite can happen. You have a hard time learning to decode. Maybe you have a learning disability. Or maybe no one teaches you how to decode. Or both. Now you're a struggling reader. You can't read very well, so you don't read much, and you miss out on the opportunity to learn the meaning of new words through reading. One study estimated that a fifth grader who reads at the 90th percentile encounters about 2 million words every year just in text she or he reads outside of school. 18 A reader at the 10th percentile encounters just 8,000 words. That's the poor getting poorer.

When a person reaches age 15 without knowing how to sound out the word "bleak," is that a learning disability or was the child never taught how to read?

The kids in the study at the juvenile detention facility in Houston all read at the third grade level or below when they started in the tutoring program. Latashia Crenshaw, who was director of Education Support Services for the juvenile probation department when I visited, estimated that close to half the kids who come through the system have disabilities that were never identified by their schools. When she talked to their parents, they would tell her: "I knew my son had a problem in first grade when I was coming up to the school every day, telling you that something was wrong, and no one listened."

The University of Houston researchers are betting that a lot of the struggling readers locked up in the juvenile detention system can be taught how to read. Students in the study each receive 24 reading lessons of 90 minutes each. The researchers are collecting data over time to see if the reading lessons translate into things like reduced criminal activity or better educational outcomes.

I asked some of the kids in the study what they remembered about being taught to read in school. "That it was hard," said a 17-year-old I'll call DeShawn. "I just didn't know none of the words." I asked what he was learning in his reading lessons. "Like, 'ph.' It's a 'f,'" he said. "Like physics. I never knew that."

DeShawn might have a learning disability. But that's not why he couldn't read the word "physics." Someone finally taught him what he needed to know, and now he can read that word.

'Surround him with books'

Paul Morgan is a professor at Penn State University who studies the risk factors for learning difficulties. 19 He had a case study in his own home about a decade ago.

His younger son was in first grade and reading was really hard for him. Morgan's other son had been fine. "Our oldest is a voracious reader and took to it readily," he said. "He seemed to benefit from what our local school did in terms of teaching reading."

"If you can't read well in the early grades it really starts to have negative consequences on your social emotional development and your behavior."
Paul Morgan

When Morgan and his wife brought up their younger son's struggles with the school, they were told: "Read storybooks to him, surround him with books." But they'd been reading to him since he was a baby. They had tons of books in their home.

Morgan knew, from his own research, that his son needed something he wasn't getting enough of in school. He needed to be taught how to read words. So, Morgan and his wife started doing that.

"We were in a position to reorganize our work schedules," he said. They bought a book online and every morning, one of them would work with him before school. "And then he was OK. Things made sense to him. He was decoding and starting to read quickly and fluently."

They caught the problem and were able to fix it. That's not going to be the case with every child. Some kids will need lots of help. But intervening early is critical because when kids don't get off to a good start with word recognition, it can begin to affect their motivation and their mental health. 20

"If you can't read well in the early grades, your peers notice, your teacher notices, you notice," Morgan said. "And it really starts to have negative consequences on your social emotional development and your behavior."

Children who are still struggling with reading at the end of first grade rarely catch up because the kids who get off to a good start reading words are catapulting ahead. It's the rich get richer phenomenon. Everyone else quickly gets left behind.

Yet a 2019 Education Week survey found that more than half of teachers and 56 percent of postsecondary instructors who teach courses on reading said kids don't need a good grasp of phonics to read. 21 That doesn't necessarily mean they reject phonics instruction. The majority of teachers describe their approach to teaching reading as "balanced literacy" and that typically includes some phonics. But it also includes the idea that readers don't need to understand how the sounds in words are represented by letters. It's that idea from the 1970s that if kids are focused on the meaning of what they're reading, they can figure out what the words say.

This idea has been repeatedly debunked by cognitive scientists, but it lingers in education because the idea that children need to be taught how to read words has long been resisted by many educators and literacy experts. 22 Even as some people who previously dismissed the importance of phonics instruction now embrace it, an assumption that continues to undergird reading instruction is that reading skill develops naturally, as long as kids are in an environment that supports and encourages lots of reading.

When this approach doesn't work for a child, there are typically two responses.

1. There must be a problem in the home. The child wasn't read to enough.

2. There must be a problem in the child. He or she has a disability.

But usually it's neither. Most of the time, when kids can't read, it's because they weren't taught how to do it.

The importance of language comprehension

You can't be a good reader without good word recognition skills. Reading scientists refer to word recognition as a "sine qua non" of being a good reader. 23 But good word recognition skills are only half the equation. Research shows that once kids have mastered the basics of decoding, their ability to understand what they read is largely determined by the level of their language comprehension. 24

There's a lot to language comprehension. 25 It's all the words you know the meaning of, and your understanding of how language works - grammar, syntax. 26 It also includes the things you know. For example, if you don't know what "sine qua non" means, you may not have fully understood the paragraph above. "Sine qua non" is a Latin phrase that means "an essential condition; something that is absolutely necessary."

Knowledge is critical when it comes to understanding what you read. 27 Consider this passage:

Australia failed to fully capitalise on the second-wicket stand of 182 between Smith and Finch, as Michael Clarke's men were stunted by the off-breaks of Ravichandran Ashwin and a curious collective failure against back-of-a-length bowling. 28

You may be able to read all the words just fine but have absolutely no idea what this passage is about - unless you know something about cricket. This passage is from a BBC report on Australia's victory in the 2015 Cricket World Cup semi-final.

Your ability to comprehend what you read is linked to your knowledge. This is one reason there's an association between a child's reading comprehension and their family's income; more income often means more opportunity for experiences that build knowledge of the world.

But how well you do on a reading comprehension test is going to be partly a function of what's on the test. A 10-year-old in New Zealand, where there's lots of cricket, would probably fare much better on a test that included a passage about cricket than a 10-year-old in the United States would. The American kid would likely do better with a passage about baseball. But of course, some kids know much more about baseball than others. A famous study found that struggling readers who know a lot about baseball did better comprehending a passage about baseball than good readers who don't know much about baseball. 29

The challenge with reading comprehension tests is that, at the end of the day, they are tests of knowledge, and in the United States we don't have a canon of knowledge we've decided every child needs to master. We have common standards, which are essentially lists of things students should be able to do, such as "determine the main idea" and "describe characters in a story." 30 We don't have agreed upon curriculum. It's up to states, to schools - sometimes to individual teachers - to decide what to teach. They choose the books, the materials, the content.

One of the ironic consequences of nationwide concern about poor reading scores is that schools appear to be focusing more on reading instruction at the expense of other subjects. 31 Time spent on reading instruction in the early grades typically takes 90 minutes to three hours daily; science and social studies might be 30 to 45 minutes, a few times a week - at best. Add to this the fact that kids who are struggling with reading are often pulled out of class during science and social studies for extra reading help.

When schools don't put enough focus on general knowledge, it can be particularly harmful to the reading development of kids from low-income families. Consider two children.

One starts school with lots of knowledge and vocabulary. Her parents are college graduates who chat with her about lots of things. She attends summer camps, goes on vacations, takes trips to the science museum.

Another child hasn't had the same opportunities: he rarely leaves his neighborhood, his parents work late, there may be few bedtime stories.

You can teach both of these kids how to decode, but the girl will likely have an edge when it comes to reading comprehension because of the knowledge she is acquiring outside of school. If a goal of education is equity, schools have to pay attention to building knowledge and vocabulary, exposing kids to lots of content, helping them access a wide range of information and experiences. And schools need to encourage kids to read a lot. Because reading is one of the best ways to learn.

That's why teaching kids how to read words is so important. A child who comes to school weak on the language comprehension side of the equation will never catch up if he doesn't get good at decoding. But if a child is taught to decode in the early grades, he has just been given his best shot.

'I ain't none a yo' mama!'

Making sure that children get off to a good start with reading is critical because of the downward spiral that can begin as soon as kids begin to struggle. This means recognizing the factors that can make learning to read more challenging for some kids.

One of the big challenges for many children is when the language they speak at home is different from the language they use at school. English language learners, for example. Kids who speak Spanish or Korean or Arabic at home. But this can be native English speakers, too.

Julie Washington is a speech-language pathologist at Georgia State University who studies language and reading development in African American children. She's specifically interested in the role of African American English. 32

African American English is a dialect of English. Every language has dialects. They're rule-governed variations of a parent language that can affect not just the pronunciation of words but also vocabulary and grammar.

"An example of African American English is, 'One day, me and my mom was at home,'" Washington explained. "That is completely acceptable in African American English."

There was a moment early in her career when she realized that children who come to school speaking African American English might have a harder time learning how to read.

She was reading "Are You My Mother?" by P.D. Eastman with a 4-year-old girl. The book is about a baby bird who is looking for his mother. He approaches different animals and objects and asks, "Are you my mother?"

When Washington was done reading the book, she asked the girl to retell the story.

"Is you my mama?" the girl exclaimed. "I ain't none a yo' mama!"

"We've decided as a country that if you are having trouble reading and you're poor, you're having trouble with reading because you're poor. Because our policy does not allow you to be both learning disabled and poor."
Julie Washington

When she went back to her office, Washington thought about how much work that girl had to do. She listened, recoded the story into her own language, and then retold it. "That takes a lot of working memory," Washington said. "It takes a pretty good vocabulary."

That little girl had to do a lot of work because there was a difference between the language she knew and the language of the book.

"The kid who comes to school whose language system mirrors the book doesn't have that work to do," she said. "He can go straight for decoding and not have to do all of those other steps in between."

Washington says schools need to understand that children who are heavy dialect users may need more time, and more help, to be successful with reading. 33 She says almost all low-income African American children speak African American English at home. Middle- and upper-income kids are more likely to either not use dialect at all, or to be able to code switch. "They've had more access outside of the community," Washington said. "They go to schools where there are more kids using mainstream English."

Who gets help?

Think of family income as a kind of buffer when it comes to the risk of being a struggling reader.

But it's not just your family's income that can tilt things in your favor when it comes to learning how to read; it's the income level of the school you attend too. Research shows that schools where the majority of kids are from poor families are less effective on average at promoting reading achievement. 34 Who goes to high-poverty schools? 35 According to the U.S. Department of Education, nearly half of all Black and Hispanic students in the United States attend high-poverty schools but only 8 percent of white students do.

When children from low-income families are concentrated in the same schools, it can be difficult to identify the children with reading disabilities such as dyslexia because so many of the kids are struggling. "I go into poor schools - nobody has dyslexia in a poor school," Washington said. "In the face of a population where eight and a half out of ten are struggling with reading, who has a reading disability? The answer is, we have no idea."

She says part of the problem is the way federal law defines learning disabilities. The law says a child cannot qualify for a learning disability if that child's learning problems are primarily the result of economic disadvantage. 36 "We've decided as a country that if you are having trouble reading and you're poor, you're having trouble with reading because you're poor," she said. "Because our policy does not allow you to be both learning disabled and poor."

The purpose of the policy was to prevent low-income children of color from being overidentified for special education. 37 But the policy has had unintended consequences, according to Paul Morgan.

"We hear from teachers that they have been told not to refer any more children of color," he said. "That they're already at their threshold."

Research by Morgan and his colleagues shows that white children in the United States who are struggling the most with reading are significantly more likely than children of color to get special education services. 38
Who gets special education?
Among children whose reading achievement placed them in the lowest 10 percent of all scores, white children were more likely to be receiving special education services.

This data suggests that more than half the children of color in this country who are struggling the most with reading are not getting the help they need and are entitled to by federal law. It also suggests that many white children are not getting help, either. Morgan says getting special education services for a student with a reading disability can be difficult no matter who you are or what kind of school your child goes to. "Too often parents have to fight for their children to be provided the services," he said. "And when the school says 'no,' there's not much of a recourse for the parent to engage in, short of legal action, which is very costly."

It's a system that favors people with money. I've interviewed parents who have spent thousands of dollars on attorneys to try to get their children into special ed, because in many schools, special education is the only way for struggling readers to get the kind of explicit instruction they need. 39

Kids who don't get into special ed, or don't have families that can pay for tutors or private school, may never get what they need to become good readers. Like the kids at the juvenile detention facility in Houston.

'Why isn't everybody in this country angry like me?'

When Sonya Thomas was told her seventh grade son was on a second-grade reading level, it changed her life.

The next month, in October 2018, she helped found a parent advocacy group called Nashville PROPEL. 40 The name stands for "parents requiring our public education system to lead." It's a group of mostly Black parents whose children are zoned to some of the lowest-performing schools in the entire state.

Sonya says many parents don't know how far behind their kids are. "They don't know until it costs them." Like it cost her and her son C.J.

Sonya wanted to figure out what happened to C.J. Why has he had such a hard time learning to read? Does he have a learning disability the school system missed?

She requested all of C.J.'s school records, and APM Reports hired Zack Barnes, an assistant professor of special education at Austin Peay State University, to review them. 41 Barnes used to teach in the Nashville schools, so he was familiar with the forms and records in C.J.'s file. He went over them with Sonya and me.

The records show C.J. started off behind. A reading assessment in kindergarten shows he was "below benchmark." But it doesn't say what he was behind in.

At the beginning of first grade, C.J. took a reading test that placed him at the 24th percentile nationally. That means more than three quarters of first graders in the country were doing better than he was. There's a form in the file that says C.J. had no problem understanding and using vocabulary but that he spoke slowly and sometimes had a hard time asking and answering questions.

"I do remember having some concerns about his speech," Sonya said. "Like not talking a lot, being really shy." She says she sometimes had a hard time understanding what he was saying.

There's no indication in the records that C.J. was evaluated for a speech issue or a reading problem. There is the handwritten note from Sonya when C.J. was in first grade, asking the school to test him for a learning disability.

"I am very concerned," the note says. "Please assist me." But he wasn't tested.

At the end of first grade, C.J. scored at the 12th percentile on the same test he had taken at the beginning of the year. The gap between C.J. and his peers had grown even wider. Sonya teared up when Barnes pointed this out. "This tears me all to pieces," she said.

We spent nearly two hours going over C.J.'s entire school file, grade by grade. There are nearly 200 pages of records, and Barnes noticed a pattern. Some years C.J. got pulled out of the classroom for extra help with reading. His test scores went up. Then the help stopped. Barnes likened it to a lifeguard saving someone and then allowing them to drown a few minutes later. "I don't think what we are seeing is uncommon, across the country," he wrote me later in an email.

Barnes says things might have been different if C.J. had been in special education. He would have had an Individualized Education Program and rights to services protected by federal law. But to get into special ed, you need to be identified with a disability. To determine if C.J. has a disability, he'd need a full evaluation from a school psychologist. C.J. never got one of those. Barnes says he should have. "He's this kind of student that we really need to dig deep on to figure out, how can we help C.J.?"

Barnes offered to help Sonya get C.J. an evaluation. She was grateful, but angry. C.J. just finished eighth grade. She had asked for him to be tested for a learning disability in first grade. She wonders how many other kids needed help and didn't get it. "There is this heavy feeling that I have," she said, pausing for a long sigh. "I don't know how to fix it. Except to keep telling parents to question everything and everybody, so they don't have to go all of these years like I did, to try to get down to the bottom of it."

I contacted the Nashville Public Schools to see if someone could answer questions about what happened with C.J. A spokesperson declined to comment.

When reading instruction is based on the flawed assumption that reading will come pretty easily to most kids as long as they're in the right environment, reading instruction is tilted in favor of the few. The few who don't need much instruction. The few from families who can pay to get their kids what they need.

The bottom line is that learning to read is not easy for many kids. Reading difficulty is natural. 42

Cognitive scientists have known this for a long time. In 1980, Phil Gough wrote this: "The statistically average child, normally endowed and normally taught, learns to read only with considerable difficulty. He does not learn to read naturally." 43

Sonya Thomas wants everyone to know about what she and C.J. have gone through. And she wants to help other parents get what they need for their kids. She's now executive director of PROPEL, the parent group she helped to found. It's her full-time job. She wants to see a movement of parents across the country demanding better reading instruction.

"Why isn't everyone in this country angry like me? Why are they not losing sleep?" she said. "It's unacceptable for children to not have a chance right off the bat. And we are not going to let anybody sleep until we have changed for the better for all children."

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Many kids struggle with reading - and children of color are far less likely to get the help they need

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A false assumption about what it takes to be a skilled reader has created deep inequalities among U.S. children, putting many on a difficult path in life.

# data[].attributes.headline
Hard Words:  Why aren't kids being taught to read?

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Hard Words:  Why aren't kids being taught to read?

# data[].attributes.body
by Emily Hanford
Sept. 10, 2018

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Scientific research has shown how children learn to read and how they should be taught. But many educators don’t know the science and, in some cases, actively resist it. As a result, millions of kids are being set up to fail.

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Experts say widely used reading curriculum is failing kids

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Experts say widely used reading curriculum is failing kids

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by Emily Hanford
Jan. 27, 2020

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Most Americans have likely never heard of Lucy Calkins, but their children's teachers probably have. Calkins, a professor of education at Columbia University, has created one of the nation's most widely used reading instruction programs, and, according to a groundbreaking new report, the program is deeply flawed.

Calkins' Units of Study series, which thousands of American teachers are using to teach children to read, "would be unlikely to lead to literacy success for all of America's public schoolchildren," the report concluded. "Children who arrive at school already reading or primed to read ... may integrate seamlessly into the routines of the Units of Study model and maintain a successful reading trajectory. However, children who need additional practice opportunities in a specific area of reading or language development likely would not."

Listen to the latest episode of the Educate podcast to hear reviewers talk about the report's findings.

The report was released by the nonprofit educational consulting group Student Achievement Partners (SAP). The group asked prominent reading researchers to review Calkins' Units of Study, more commonly known as "reading workshop." It appears to be the first time a group of reading researchers has reviewed a curriculum and determined whether the lessons reflect more than 40 years of scientific research on how reading skill develops.

"As far as I know, [this review] is new and different and necessary," said Sue Pimentel, a founding partner of SAP.

The United States has a serious reading problem. Recent test scores show more than a third of the nation's fourth-graders can't read at a basic level. That's despite the fact that scientists have discovered so much about how the brain learns to read and what children need to be taught. "I think there's frustration out there," Pimentel said. "It was time to take a close look. Is there a mismatch happening between what the research is saying and what publishers are producing?"

Calkins' Units of Study is the third most widely used set of core materials to teach reading, according to a survey by Education Week. But, as APM Reports has shown, the Units of Study lessons and materials frequently assert an idea about how people read that has been proven wrong by cognitive scientists. The idea, known as three cueing, encourages children to look at pictures and use contextual clues to identify words as they are reading. Scientific research shows that skilled readers do not use cues to read words and that instructing children to use these cues teaches them the habits of struggling readers.

The SAP reviewers identified cueing as a major flaw in Calkins' program.

"The program strongly recommends use of the three-cueing system as a valid procedure for assessing and diagnosing a student's reading needs," noted David Paige, an associate professor at Bellarmine University and one of seven researchers who conducted the review. "This is in direct opposition to an enormous body of settled research and even runs contrary to the Units of Study foundational skills materials that support the teaching of phonics."

In 2018, Calkins developed a Units of Study for teaching phonics. Before that, her instructional materials had largely ignored phonics.

Calkins did not respond to an interview request from APM Reports. She sent a statement through her publisher, Heinemann, in which she said that she and her team will "learn from this review as we have learned from everything else."

Research shows that beginning readers who focus on letter-sound relationships increase activity in the area of the brain best wired for reading and that phonics instruction improves children's reading success.

Paige reviewed the new phonics curriculum and other Units of Study materials and found they don't provide children with the kind of explicit instruction and practice time that research has shown is needed for all students to develop good reading skills. "The materials are contradictory," Paige said in an interview. "The materials do talk about phonics, they do teach some phonics, but then it's all just contradicted with the infusion of this [cueing] stuff throughout the curriculum."

In December, Calkins denied that her method for teaching reading is based on the cueing system. But reviewers found numerous instances of it in her curriculum materials. "The three-cueing system is baked into this program," said reviewer Claude Goldenberg, an emeritus professor at Stanford University.

Goldenberg called Calkins "dishonest" for denying that she advises teachers to use a cueing approach. "Anyone who uses her program is using [cueing], whether they call it that or they call it something else," he said.

Reviewers were also asked to look at how well Calkins' materials cover other essential aspects of reading proficiency such as building vocabulary and knowledge. Calkins has long maintained that her approach supports the development of oral language and reading comprehension skills.

However, the reviewers found her materials lacking in these areas too.

Reviewers concluded that the program's approach to knowledge-building and language development is "too unsystematic to ensure that all students would encounter adequate challenge or receive sufficient supports for successful progress, particularly in grades K-2."

For students who come from homes where they're exposed to sophisticated oral language and who acquire knowledge from well-educated parents, the lack of explicit instruction in these areas might not be a problem. But other students may be left behind, according to reviewer Marilyn Adams, a prominent reading researcher who is a visiting scholar at Brown University. "Students who enter school having had fewer opportunities to grow academic knowledge and vocabulary depend critically on such opportunities to catch up and move forward," Adams wrote.

And even students who develop vocabulary and knowledge at home could be learning more than what Units of Study provides. "All students are short-changed when knowledge-building opportunities are missed," Adams wrote.

Reviewer Tim Shanahan, an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, agreed. "One suspects that students who are already on or above grade level in reading may do fine [in Units of Study] ... though they may not learn as much as they possibly could."

Reviewers did have positive things to say about Units of Study. They noted that the lessons are engaging and "beautifully crafted," and that the materials are organized "above all on the value of loving to read and the encouragement of reading and writing as lifelong habits."

"That's really important," Paige said. "Kids have to see a value in being able to read, and if they don't see a value, then they learn it as just something that they can do."

Research shows that motivation matters. But in interviews, reviewers noted that an assumption that seems to underlie Units of Study is that if children are motivated to read, they will learn how to do it. This doesn't align with scientific evidence that shows reading skill does not develop naturally through exposure to text. Children have to learn how written language works, and for most children, this requires explicit instruction.

In her statement, Calkins cited an analysis by her organization at Columbia, the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, that showed students in New York City schools that have been using her materials and professional development for an average of 10 years outperformed students in other New York City Schools by 30 percentage points on the 2019 state reading test. She declined, through a representative, to provide a list of those schools.

It's important to note that curriculum is only one part of what leads to better reading outcomes for students, and that it's unlikely any one curriculum would lead to success for all students. "The most important tool in the classroom is a really knowledgeable teacher," Paige said.

But he noted that one of his concerns after reviewing Units of Study is that teachers may be picking up from the curriculum materials incorrect ideas about how skilled reading develops.

"Teachers have not received the best training in how to teach reading," Paige said. As a result, when they get into the classroom, "they really don't understand what to do. So they quite often rely on a curriculum to guide them. And unfortunately, so much of [ Units of Study] is flawed."

Listen to Emily Hanford and Stephen Smith discuss these events and more in the latest episode of Educate.
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Experts say widely used reading curriculum is failing kids

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Most Americans have likely never heard of Lucy Calkins, but their children's teachers probably have. Calkins, a professor of education at Columbia University, has created one of the nation's most widely used reading instruction programs, and, according to a groundbreaking new report, the program is deeply flawed.

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At a Loss for Words:  How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers

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At a Loss for Words:  How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers

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by Emily Hanford
Aug. 22, 2019

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Listen to this audio documentary on the Educate podcast. Subscribe now.

Molly Woodworth was a kid who seemed to do well at everything: good grades, in the gifted and talented program. But she couldn't read very well.

"There was no rhyme or reason to reading for me," she said. "When a teacher would dictate a word and say, 'Tell me how you think you can spell it,' I sat there with my mouth open while other kids gave spellings, and I thought, 'How do they even know where to begin?' I was totally lost."

Woodworth went to public school in Owosso, Michigan, in the 1990s. She says sounds and letters just didn't make sense to her, and she doesn't remember anyone teaching her how to read. So she came up with her own strategies to get through text.

Strategy 1: Memorize as many words as possible. "Words were like pictures to me," she said. "I had a really good memory."

Strategy 2: Guess the words based on context. If she came across a word she didn't have in her visual memory bank, she'd look at the first letter and come up with a word that seemed to make sense. Reading was kind of like a game of 20 Questions: What word could this be?

Strategy 3: If all else failed, she'd skip the words she didn't know.

Most of the time, she could get the gist of what she was reading. But getting through text took forever. "I hated reading because it was taxing," she said. "I'd get through a chapter and my brain hurt by the end of it. I wasn't excited to learn."

No one knew how much she struggled, not even her parents. Her reading strategies were her "dirty little secrets."

Woodworth, who now works in accounting, 1 says she's still not a very good reader and tears up when she talks about it. Reading "influences every aspect of your life," she said. She's determined to make sure her own kids get off to a better start than she did.

That's why she was so alarmed to see how her oldest child, Claire, was being taught to read in school.

As long as this disproven theory remains part of American education, many kids will likely struggle to learn how to read.

A couple of years ago, Woodworth was volunteering in Claire's kindergarten classroom. The class was reading a book together and the teacher was telling the children to practice the strategies that good readers use.

The teacher said, "If you don't know the word, just look at this picture up here," Woodworth recalled. "There was a fox and a bear in the picture. And the word was bear, and she said, 'Look at the first letter. It's a "b." Is it fox or bear?'"

Woodworth was stunned. "I thought, 'Oh my God, those are my strategies.' Those are the things I taught myself to look like a good reader, not the things that good readers do," she said. "These kids were being taught my dirty little secrets."

She went to the teacher and expressed her concerns. The teacher told her she was teaching reading the way the curriculum told her to.

Woodworth had stumbled on to American education's own little secret about reading: Elementary schools across the country are teaching children to be poor readers - and educators may not even know it.

For decades, reading instruction in American schools has been rooted in a flawed theory about how reading works, a theory that was debunked decades ago by cognitive scientists, yet remains deeply embedded in teaching practices and curriculum materials. As a result, the strategies that struggling readers use to get by - memorizing words, using context to guess words, skipping words they don't know - are the strategies that many beginning readers are taught in school. This makes it harder for many kids to learn how to read, and children who don't get off to a good start in reading find it difficult to ever master the process. 2

A shocking number of kids in the United States can't read very well. A third of all fourth-graders can't read at a basic level, and most students are still not proficient readers by the time they finish high school.
Percentage of U.S. fourth-graders below basic level in reading
When kids struggle to learn how to read, it can lead to a downward spiral in which behavior, vocabulary, knowledge and other cognitive skills are eventually affected by slow reading development. 3 A disproportionate number of poor readers become high school dropouts and end up in the criminal justice system. 4

The fact that a disproven theory about how reading works is still driving the way many children are taught to read is part of the problem. School districts spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on curriculum materials that include this theory. Teachers are taught the theory in their teacher preparation programs and on the job. As long as this disproven theory remains part of American education, many kids will likely struggle to learn how to read.
Percentage of U.S. 12th-graders proficient in reading
The origins

The theory is known as "three cueing." The name comes from the notion that readers use three different kinds of information - or "cues" - to identify words as they are reading.

The theory was first proposed in 1967, when an education professor named Ken Goodman presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in New York City.

In the paper, 5 Goodman rejected the idea that reading is a precise process that involves exact or detailed perception of letters or words. Instead, he argued that as people read, they make predictions about the words on the page using these three cues:

graphic cues (what do the letters tell you about what the word might be?)

syntactic cues (what kind of word could it be, for example, a noun or a verb?)

semantic cues (what word would make sense here, based on the context?)

Goodman concluded that:

Skill in reading involves not greater precision, but more accurate first guesses based on better sampling techniques, greater control over language structure, broadened experiences and increased conceptual development. As the child develops reading skill and speed, he uses increasingly fewer graphic cues.

Goodman's proposal became the theoretical basis for a new approach to teaching reading that would soon take hold in American schools.

Previously, the question of how to teach reading had focused on one of two basic ideas.

One idea is that reading is a visual memory process. The teaching method associated with this idea is known as "whole word." The whole word approach was perhaps best embodied in the "Dick and Jane" books that first appeared in the 1930s. The books rely on word repetition, and pictures to support the meaning of the text. The idea is that if you see words enough, you eventually store them in your memory as visual images.

The other idea is that reading requires knowledge of the relationships between sounds and letters. Children learn to read by sounding out words. This approach is known as phonics. It goes way back, popularized in the 1800s with the McGuffey readers.

These two ideas - whole word and phonics - had been taking turns as the favored way to teach reading until Goodman came along with what came to be known among educators as the "three-cueing system."

In the cueing theory of how reading works, when a child comes to a word she doesn't know, the teacher encourages her to think of a word that makes sense and asks: Does it look right? Does it sound right? If a word checks out on the basis of those questions, the child is getting it. She's on the path to skilled reading.

Teachers may not know the term "three cueing," but they're probably familiar with "MSV." M stands for using meaning to figure out what a word is, S for using sentence structure and V for using visual information (i.e., the letters in the words). MSV is a cueing idea that can be traced back to the late Marie Clay, a developmental psychologist from New Zealand who first laid out her theories about reading in a dissertation in the 1960s. 6

Clay developed her cueing theory independently of Goodman, but they met several times and had similar ideas about the reading process. Their theories were based on observational research. They would listen to children read, note the kinds of errors they made, and use that information to identify a child's reading difficulties. For example, a child who says "horse" when the word was "house" is probably relying too much on visual, or graphic, cues. A teacher in this case would encourage the child to pay more attention to what word would make sense in the sentence.

Goodman and Clay believed that letters were the least reliable of the three cues, and that as people became better readers, they no longer needed to pay attention to all the letters in words. "In efficient word perception the reader relies mostly on the sentence and its meaning and some selected features of the forms of words," Clay wrote. 7 For Goodman, accurate word recognition was not necessarily the goal of reading. The goal was to comprehend text. 8 If the sentences were making sense, the reader must be getting the words right, or right enough.

These ideas soon became the foundation for how reading was taught in many schools. Goodman's three-cueing idea formed the theoretical basis of an approach known as "whole language" that by the late 1980s had taken hold throughout America. 9 Clay built her cueing ideas into a reading intervention program for struggling first-graders called Reading Recovery. It was implemented across New Zealand in the 1980s and went on to become one of the world's most widely used reading intervention programs. 10

But while cueing was taking hold in schools, scientists were busy studying the cognitive processes involved in reading words. And they came to different conclusions about how people read. 11

Scientists take on three cueing

It was the early 1970s, and Keith Stanovich was working on his doctorate in psychology at the University of Michigan. He thought the reading field was ready for an infusion of knowledge from the "cognitive revolution" that was underway in psychology. Stanovich had a background in experimental science and an interest in learning and cognition due in part to the influence of his wife, Paula, who was a special education teacher.

Stanovich wanted to understand how people read words. 12 He knew about Goodman's work and thought he was probably right that as people become better readers, they relied more on their knowledge of vocabulary and language structure to read words and didn't need to pay as much attention to the letters.

So, in 1975, Stanovich and a fellow graduate student set out to test the idea in their lab. They recruited readers of various ages and abilities and gave them a series of word-reading tasks. Their hypothesis was that skilled readers rely more on contextual cues to recognize words than poor readers, who probably weren't as good at using context.

They couldn't have been more wrong.

"To our surprise, all of our research results pointed in the opposite direction," Stanovich wrote. "It was the poorer readers, not the more skilled readers, who were more reliant on context to facilitate word recognition." 13

The skilled readers could instantly recognize words without relying on context. Other researchers have confirmed these findings with similar experiments. It turns out that the ability to read words in isolation quickly and accurately is the hallmark of being a skilled reader. This is now one of the most consistent and well-replicated findings in all of reading research. 14

Other studies revealed further problems with the cueing theory: 15

Skilled readers don't scan words and sample from the graphic cues in an incidental way; instead, they very quickly recognize a word as a sequence of letters. That's how good readers instantly know the difference between "house" and "horse," for example.

Experiments that force people to use context to predict words show that even skilled readers can correctly guess only a fraction of the words; this is one reason people who rely on context to identify words are poor readers.

Weak word recognition skills are the most common and debilitating source of reading problems. 16

The results of these studies are not controversial or contested among scientists who study reading. The findings have been incorporated into every major scientific model of how reading works.

But cueing is still alive and well in schools.

Picture Power!

It's not hard to find examples of the cueing system. A quick search on Google, Pinterest or Teachers Pay Teachers turns up plenty of lesson plans, teaching guides and classroom posters. One popular poster has cute cartoon characters to remind children they have lots of strategies to use when they're stuck on a word, including looking at the picture (Eagle Eye), getting their lips ready to try the first sound (Lips the Fish), or just skipping the word altogether (Skippy Frog).

There are videos online where you can see cueing in action. In one video posted on The Teaching Channel, 17 a kindergarten teacher in Oakland, California, instructs her students to use "picture power" to identify the words on the page. The goal of the lesson, according to the teacher, is for the students to "use the picture and a first sound to determine an unknown word in their book."

The class reads a book together called "In the Garden." On each page, there's a picture of something you might find in a garden. It's what's known as a predictable book; the sentences are all the same except for the last word.

The children have been taught to memorize the words "look," "at," and "the." The challenge is getting the last word in the sentence. The lesson plan tells the teacher to cover up the word with a sticky note.

In the video, the wiggly kindergarteners sitting cross-legged on the floor come to a page with a picture of a butterfly. The teacher tells the kids that she's guessing the word is going to be butterfly. She uncovers the word to check on the accuracy of her guess.

"Look at that," she tells the children, pointing to the first letter of the word. "It starts with the /b/ /b/ /b/." The class reads the sentence together as the teacher points to the words. "Look at the butterfly!" they yell out excitedly.

This lesson comes from "Units of Study for Teaching Reading," more commonly known as "reader's workshop." 18 According to the lesson plan, this lesson teaches children to "know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words." 19

But the children were not taught to decode words in this lesson. They were taught to guess words using pictures and patterns - hallmarks of the three-cueing system.

The author of Units of Study for Teaching Reading, Lucy Calkins, often refers to cueing in her published work. 20 She uses the term MSV - the meaning, structure and visual idea that originally came from Clay in New Zealand.

Then there is Fountas and Pinnell Literacy, started by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, teachers who learned the MSV concept from Clay in the 1980s. 21

Fountas and Pinnell have written several books about teaching reading, including a best-seller about a widely used instructional approach called "Guided Reading." They also created a reading assessment system that uses what are called "leveled books." 22 Children start with predictable books like "In the Garden" and move up levels as they're able to "read" the words. But many of the words in those books - butterfly, caterpillar - are words that beginning readers haven't been taught to decode yet. One purpose of the books is to teach children that when they get to a word they don't know, they can use context to figure it out.

When put into practice in the classroom, these approaches can cause problems for children when they are learning to read.

'That is not reading'

Margaret Goldberg, a teacher and literacy coach in the Oakland Unified School District, remembers a moment when she realized what a problem the three-cueing approach was. She was with a first-grader named Rodney when he came to a page with a picture of a girl licking an ice cream cone and a dog licking a bone.

The text said: "My little dog likes to eat with me."

But Rodney said: "My dog likes to lick his bone."

Rodney breezed right through it, unaware that he hadn't read the sentence on the page.

Goldberg realized lots of her students couldn't actually read the words in their books; instead, they were memorizing sentence patterns and using the pictures to guess. One little boy exclaimed, "I can read this book with my eyes shut!"

"Oh no," Goldberg thought. "That is not reading."

Goldberg had been hired by the Oakland schools in 2015 to help struggling readers by teaching a Fountas and Pinnell program called "Leveled Literacy Intervention" that uses leveled books and the cueing approach. 23

Around the same time, Goldberg was trained in a program that uses a different strategy for teaching children how to read words. The program is called "Systematic Instruction in Phonological Awareness, Phonics, and Sight Words," or SIPPS. 24 It's a phonics program that teaches children how to sound out words and uses what are known as "decodable books." Most words in the books have spelling patterns that kids have been taught in their phonics lessons.

Goldberg decided to teach some of her students using the phonics program and some of her students using three cueing. And she began to notice differences between the two groups of kids. "Not just in their abilities to read," she said, "but in the way they approached their reading."

Goldberg and a colleague recorded first-graders talking about what makes them good readers.

One video shows Mia, on the left, who was in the phonics program. Mia says she's a good reader because she looks at the words and sounds them out. JaBrea, on the right, was taught the cueing system. JaBrea says: "I look at the pictures and I read it."

Courtesy of Margaret Goldberg, Oakland Unified School District

It was clear to Goldberg after just a few months of teaching both approaches that the students learning phonics were doing better. "One of the things that I still struggle with is a lot of guilt," she said.

She thinks the students who learned three cueing were actually harmed by the approach. "I did lasting damage to these kids. It was so hard to ever get them to stop looking at a picture to guess what a word would be. It was so hard to ever get them to slow down and sound a word out because they had had this experience of knowing that you predict what you read before you read it."

Goldberg soon discovered the decades of scientific evidence against cueing. 25 She was shocked. She had never come across any of this science in her teacher preparation or on the job.

And she started to wonder why not.

Balanced Literacy

People have been arguing for centuries about how children should be taught to read. The fight has mostly focused on whether to teach phonics.

The whole language movement of the late 20th century was perhaps the zenith of the anti-phonics argument. 26 Phonics instruction was seen as tedious, time-consuming and ultimately unnecessary. Why? Because - according to the three-cueing theory - readers can use other, more reliable cues to figure out what the words say. 27

Marilyn Adams came across this belief in the early 1990s. She's a cognitive and developmental psychologist who had just written a book summarizing the research on how children learn to read. 28 One big takeaway from the book is that becoming a skilled reader of English requires knowledge of sound-spelling correspondences. 29 Another big takeaway is that many kids were not being taught this in school.

Soon after the book was published, Adams was describing her findings to a group of teachers and state education officials in Sacramento, California. She was sensing discomfort and confusion in the room. "And I just stopped and said, 'What is it that I'm missing?'" she recalled. "'What is it that we need to talk about? Help me.'"

A woman raised her hand and asked: "What does this have to do with the three-cueing system?" Marilyn didn't know what the three-cueing system was. "I think I blew all of their fuses that I did not [know what it was] since this was so fundamental to being an elementary reading teacher," she said. "How could I present myself to them as an expert on reading and not know about this?"

The teachers drew her a Venn diagram of the three-cueing system. It looked something like this:

Adams thought this diagram made perfect sense. The research clearly shows that readers use all of these cues to understand what they're reading.

But Adams soon figured out the disconnect. Teachers understood these cues not just as the way readers construct meaning from text, but as the way readers actually identify the words on the page. And they thought that teaching kids to decode or sound out words was not necessary.

"The most important thing was for the children to understand and enjoy the text," Adams said. "And from that understanding and joy of reading, the words on the page would just pop out at them."

She would explain to teachers at every opportunity that explicitly teaching children about the relationships between sounds and letters is essential to ensure all kids get off to a good start in reading. But she got tons of pushback from teachers. "They didn't want to teach phonics!" she recalled in frustration.

In 1998, Adams wrote a book chapter about how the three-cueing system conflicts with what researchers have figured out about reading. She hoped it would help put three cueing to rest. 30

By this time, the scientific research on reading was gaining traction. In 2000, a national panel convened by Congress to review the evidence on how to teach reading came out with a report. 31 It identified several essential components of reading instruction, including vocabulary, comprehension and phonics. The evidence that phonics instruction enhances children's success in learning how to read was clear and compelling. National reports on reading a few years later in the United Kingdom and Australia came to the same conclusion. 32

"When I got into the classroom and someone told me to use this practice, I didn't question it."-Stacey Cherny

Eventually, many whole language supporters accepted the weight of the scientific evidence about the importance of phonics instruction. They started adding phonics to their books and materials and renamed their approach "balanced literacy."

But they didn't get rid of the three-cueing system.

Balanced literacy proponents will tell you their approach is a mix of phonics instruction with plenty of time for kids to read and enjoy books. But look carefully at the materials and you'll see that's not really what balanced literacy is mixing. Instead, it's mixing a bunch of different ideas about how kids learn to read. It's a little bit of whole word instruction with long lists of words for kids to memorize. It's a little bit of phonics. And fundamentally, it's the idea that children should be taught to read using the three-cueing system.

And it turns out cueing may actually prevent kids from focusing on words in the way they need to become skilled readers.

Mapping the words

To understand why cueing can get in the way of children's reading development, it's essential to understand how our brains process the words we see.

Reading scientists have known for decades that the hallmark of being a skilled reader is the ability to instantly and accurately recognize words. 33 If you're a skilled reader, your brain has gotten so good at reading words that you process the word "chair" faster than you process a picture of a chair. 34 You know tens of thousands of words instantly, on sight. How did you learn to do that?

It happens through a process called "orthographic mapping." 35 This occurs when you pay attention to the details of a written word and link the word's pronunciation and meaning with its sequence of letters. 36 A child knows the meaning and pronunciation of "pony." The word gets mapped to his memory when he links the sounds /p/ /o/ /n/ /y/ to the written word "pony."

That requires an awareness of the speech sounds in words and an understanding of how those sounds are represented by letters. 37 In other words, you need phonics skills.

Here's what happens when a reader who has good phonics skills comes to a word she doesn't recognize in print. She stops at the word and sounds it out. If it's a word she knows the meaning of, she has now linked the spelling of the word with its pronunciation. If she doesn't know the meaning of the word, she can use context to try to figure it out.

By about second grade, a typically developing reader needs just a few exposures to a word through understanding both the pronunciation and the spelling for that word to be stored in her memory. 38 She doesn't know that word because she memorized it as a visual image. She knows that word because at some point she successfully sounded it out.

The more words she stores in her memory this way, the more she can focus on the meaning of what she's reading; she'll eventually be using less brain power to identify words and will be able to devote more brain power to comprehending what she's reading. 39

But when children don't have good phonics skills, the process is different.

"They sample from the letters because they're not good at sounding them out," said David Kilpatrick, a psychology professor at SUNY Cortland and the author of a book about preventing reading difficulties. 40 "And they use context."

In other words, when people don't have good phonics skills, they use the cueing system.

"The three-cueing system is the way poor readers read," said Kilpatrick.

And if teachers use the cueing system to teach reading, Kilpatrick says they're not just teaching children the habits of poor readers, they are actually impeding the orthographic mapping process. 41

"The minute you ask them just to pay attention to the first letter or look at the picture, look at the context, you're drawing their attention away from the very thing that they need to interact with in order for them to read the word [and] remember the word," Kilpatrick said. In this way, he said, three cueing can actually prevent the critical learning that's necessary for a child to become a skilled reader.

In many balanced literacy classrooms, children are taught phonics and the cueing system. Some kids who are taught both approaches realize pretty quickly that sounding out a word is the most efficient and reliable way to know what it is. Those kids tend to have an easier time understanding the ways that sounds and letters relate. They'll drop the cueing strategies and begin building that big bank of instantly known words that is so necessary for skilled reading.

But some children will skip the sounding out if they're taught they have other options. Phonics is challenging for many kids. The cueing strategies seem quicker and easier at first. And by using context and memorizing a bunch of words, many children can look like good readers - until they get to about third grade, when their books begin to have more words, longer words, and fewer pictures. Then they're stuck. They haven't developed their sounding-out skills. Their bank of known words is limited. Reading is slow and laborious and they don't like it, so they don't do it if they don't have to. While their peers who mastered decoding early are reading and teaching themselves new words every day, the kids who clung to the cueing approach are falling further and further behind. 42

These poor reading habits, once ingrained at a young age, can follow kids into high school. Some kids who were taught the cueing approach never become good readers. Not because they're incapable of learning to read well but because they were taught the strategies of struggling readers.

'So what if they use the picture?'

Once Margaret Goldberg discovered the cognitive science evidence against cueing, she wanted her colleagues in the Oakland school district to know about it too.

Over the past two years, Goldberg and a fellow literacy coach named Lani Mednick have been leading a grant-funded pilot project to improve reading achievement in the Oakland schools. 43

They have their work cut out for them. Nearly half the district's third-graders are below grade level in reading. Goldberg and Mednick want to raise questions about how kids in Oakland are being taught to read.

They meet every couple weeks with literacy coaches from the 10 elementary schools in the pilot program. They read and discuss articles about the scientific research on reading. At a meeting in March, the coaches watched the video of the "picture power" lesson.

"This teacher meant well," Mednick said to the coaches after they watched the lesson. "It seemed like she believed this lesson would ensure her students would be on the road toward reading."

Mednick wanted the coaches to consider the beliefs about reading that would lead to the creation of a lesson like "picture power." The Oakland schools purchased the Units of Study for Teaching Reading series, which includes the "picture power" lesson, as part of a balanced literacy initiative the district began about 10 years ago. The district also bought the Fountas and Pinnell assessment system.

The coaches saw right away that "picture power" was designed to teach kids the cueing system. But they said many teachers don't see any problem with cueing. After all, one of the cues is to look at the letters in the word. What's wrong with teaching kids lots of different strategies to figure out unknown words? 44

"I remember before we started looking at the science and everything, I thought to myself, 'Reading is so hard for kids, so what if they use the picture?'" said Soraya Sajous-Brooks, the early literacy coach at Prescott Elementary School in West Oakland. "Like, use everything you've got."

But she's come to understand that cueing sends the message to kids that they don't need to sound out words. Her students would get phonics instruction in one part of the day. Then they'd go reader's workshop and be taught that when they come to a word they don't know, they have lots of strategies. They can sound it out. They can also check the first letter, look at the picture, think of a word that makes sense.

Teaching cueing and phonics doesn't work, Sajous-Brooks said. "One negates the other."

Goldberg and Mednick want to show the district there's a better way to teach reading. Schools in the pilot project used grant money to buy new materials that steer clear of the three-cueing idea. Two charter school networks in Oakland are working on similar projects to move their schools away from cueing.

To see what it looks like, I visited a first-grade classroom at a charter school in Oakland called Achieve Academy. 45

One part of the day was explicit phonics instruction. 46 The students were divided into small groups based on their skill level. They met with their teacher, Andrea Ruiz, at a kidney-shaped table in a corner of the classroom. The lowest-level group worked on identifying the speech sounds in words like "skin" and "skip." The highest-level group learned how verbs like "spy" and "cry" are spelled as "spied' and 'cried" in the past tense.

There were also vocabulary lessons. 47 The entire class gathered on a rug at the front of the classroom to talk about a book Ms. Ruiz read out loud to them. One of the words in the book was "prey."

"What animals are a chameleon's prey?" Ms. Ruiz asked the children. "Or we can also ask, what animals do chameleons hunt for food?"

The kids turned and talked to each other. "A chameleon's prey are bugs and insects and other chameleons and mice and birds," a little boy explained to his classmate. "That's it."

Other vocabulary words these first-graders had learned were posted on cards around the classroom. They included: wander, persevere, squint and scrumptious. The kids weren't expected to read those words yet. The idea is to build their oral vocabulary so that when they can read those words, they know what the words mean.

This comes straight from the scientific research, which shows that reading comprehension is the product of two things. 48 First, a child needs to be able to sound out a word. Second, the child needs to know the meaning of the word she just sounded out. So, in a first-grade classroom that's following the research, you will see explicit phonics instruction and also lessons that build oral vocabulary and background knowledge. And you will see kids practicing what they've been taught.

After their vocabulary lesson, the kids did "buddy reading." They retreated to various spots around the classroom to read books to each other. I found Belinda sitting on an adult chair at the back of the classroom, her little legs swinging. Across from her was her buddy Steven, decked out in a yellow and blue plaid shirt tucked neatly into his jeans. He held the book and pointed to the words while Belinda read.

"Ellen /m/," Belinda paused, sounding out the word "meets." She was reading a decodable book about some kids who visit a farm. Almost all of the words in the book contain spelling patterns she'd been taught in her phonics lessons.

"I am a farm here," Belinda read.

Steven did a double-take. "A farmer here," he said gently. Steven's job as Belinda's reading buddy was to help her if she missed a word or got stuck. But that didn't happen much because Belinda had been taught how to read the words. She didn't need any help from the pictures, either. She barely glanced at them as she read.

To be clear, there's nothing wrong with pictures. They're great to look at and talk about, and they can help a child comprehend the meaning of a story. Context - including a picture if there is one - helps us understand what we're reading all the time. But if a child is being taught to use context to identify words, she's being taught to read like a poor reader.

Many educators don't know this because the cognitive science research has not made its way into many schools and schools of education. 49

Ruiz didn't know about this research until the Oakland pilot project. "I didn't really know anything about how kids learn to read when I started teaching," she said. It was a relief when she came to Oakland and the curriculum spelled out that kids use meaning, structure and visual cues to figure out words. "Because I came from not having anything, I was like, 'Oh, there's a way we should teach this,'" she said.

I heard this from other educators. Cueing was appealing because they didn't know what else to do.

"When I got into the classroom and someone told me to use this practice, I didn't question it," said Stacey Cherny, a former teacher who's now principal of an elementary school in Pennsylvania. She says many teachers aren't taught what they need to know about the structure of the English language to be able to teach phonics well. She says phonics can be intimidating; three cueing isn't.

Another reason cueing holds on is that it seems to work for some children. But researchers estimate there's a percentage of kids - perhaps about 40 percent - who will learn to read no matter how they're taught. 50 According to Kilpatrick, children who learn to read with cueing are succeeding in spite of the instruction, not because of it.

Goldberg hopes the pilot project in Oakland will convince the district to drop all instructional materials that include cueing.

When asked about this, the Oakland superintendent's office responded with a written statement that there isn't enough evidence from the pilot project to make curriculum changes for the entire district and that the Oakland schools remain committed to balanced literacy.

Oakland's situation is no different from many other districts across the country that have invested millions of dollars in materials that include cueing.

"It feels like everyone's trusting somebody else to have done their due diligence," Goldberg said. "Classroom teachers are trusting that the materials they're being handed will work. The people who purchase the materials are trusting if they were on the market, that they will work. We're all trusting, and it's a system that is broken."

'My science is different'

If cueing was debunked decades ago by cognitive scientists, why is the idea still in materials that are being sold to schools?

One answer to that question is that school districts still buy the materials. Heinemann, the company that publishes the Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Calkins' products that the Oakland schools use, earned somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 million in 2018, according to earnings reports. 51

I wanted to know what the authors of those materials make of the cognitive science research. And I wanted to give them a chance to explain the ideas behind their work. I wrote to Calkins, Fountas and Pinnell and asked for interviews. They all declined. Heinemann sent a statement that said every product the company sells is informed by extensive research.

I also asked Ken Goodman for an interview. It's been more than 50 years since he first laid out the three-cueing theory in that 1967 paper. I wanted to know what he thinks of the cognitive science research. Of the major proponents of three cueing I reached out to, he was the only one who agreed to an interview.

I visited Goodman at his home in Tucson, Arizona. He's 91. He uses a scooter to get around, but he's still working. He just finished a new edition of one of his books.

When I asked him what he makes of the cognitive science research, he told me he thinks scientists focus too much on word recognition. He still doesn't believe accurate word recognition is necessary for reading comprehension.

"Word recognition is a preoccupation," he said. "I don't teach word recognition. I teach people to make sense of language. And learning the words is incidental to that."

He brought up the example of a child who comes to the word "horse" and says "pony" instead. His argument is that a child will still understand the meaning of the story because horse and pony are the same concept.

I pressed him on this. First of all, a pony isn't the same thing as a horse. Second, don't you want to make sure that when a child is learning to read, he understands that /p/ /o/ /n/ /y/ says "pony"? And different letters say "horse"?

He dismissed my question.

"The purpose is not to learn words," he said. "The purpose is to make sense."

Cognitive scientists don't dispute that the purpose of reading is to make sense of the text. But the question is: How can you understand what you are reading if you can't accurately read the words? And if quick and accurate word recognition is the hallmark of being a skilled reader, how does a little kid get there?

Goodman rejected the idea that you can make a distinction between skilled readers and unskilled readers; he doesn't like the value judgment that implies. He said dyslexia does not exist - despite lots of evidence that it does. 52 And he said the three-cueing theory is based on years of observational research. In his view, three cueing is perfectly valid, drawn from a different kind of evidence than what scientists collect in their labs.

"My science is different," Goodman said.

This idea that there are different kinds of evidence that lead to different conclusions about how reading works is one reason people continue to disagree about how children should be taught to read. It's important for educators to understand that three cueing is based on theory and observational research and that there's decades of scientific evidence from labs all over the world that converges on a very different idea about skilled reading.

The cognitive science does not provide all the answers about how to teach children to read, but on the question of how skilled readers read words, scientists have amassed a huge body of evidence.

Goldberg thinks it's time for educators across the country to take a close look at all the materials they use to teach reading.

"We should look through the materials and search for evidence of cueing," she said. "And if it's there, don't touch it. Don't let it get near our kids, don't let it get near our classrooms, our teachers."

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How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers

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For decades, schools have taught children the strategies of struggling readers, using a theory about reading that cognitive scientists have repeatedly debunked. And many teachers and parents don't know there's anything wrong with it.

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Hard Words:  What to do if your child's school isn't teaching reading right?

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Hard Words:  What to do if your child's school isn't teaching reading right?

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by Emily Hanford
Oct. 8, 2018

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Listen to this audio documentary on the Educate podcast. Subscribe now.

In early September, we released an audio documentary and accompanying article called Hard Words: Why aren't kids being taught to read? The story documented that the scientific research about how children learn to read is not well understood by many teachers and is not guiding reading instruction in many schools. The story has been shared widely on social media and has prompted a lot of questions, particularly from parents, about what they should do if they want to improve how kids are taught to read. We reached out via email to researchers and advocates pushing for changes in reading instruction for help with some answers.

If you haven't yet read or listened to Hard Words, you might want to do that first. Some of the terms you'll find below are defined in the story. Also, we will be continuing to report on reading so please write to us with your questions and comments at contact@apmreports.org. Or find APM Reports ( Facebook | Twitter) and the Educate podcast ( Facebook | Twitter) on social media.
1. How can I find out how my child's school teaches reading? How do I know if their approach is backed up the science?
Experts say that you want to find out what programs, materials and approaches your child's teacher uses for core reading instruction. Look at the school and district websites, ask the teachers and administrators, but know that schools tend to use a lot of jargon when they describe how they teach reading - and everyone says what they're doing is backed up by research. "Parents need to arm themselves with information and be willing to ask the tough questions," said Liz Hembling, a member of Decoding Dyslexia Maryland who shared the story of her daughter's struggle with dyslexia on our podcast, Educate. Hembling recommended asking teachers to explain their approach. "If they are not teaching the sounds of language and are relying on kids 'reading a lot' and 'using pictures to get the meaning,' I would press further." Ask teachers and administrators to explain the research behind their approach too. "They should be able to do so with ease and in a way that will make sense to those not involved in reading education," said Tara Cassidy, a speech-language pathologist in Minnesota. "I want to hear about the research in relation to how the brain learns."

"Is there a poster encouraging students to guess at words from the context? Is there a 'word wall' with words listed by the alphabet, regardless of the sounds those letters represent? Those are not good signs."

If your child's school uses the term "balanced literacy," ask what that means. Balance sounds good, but the term often indicates an essentially whole-language orientation that assumes reading comes naturally and doesn't include enough time teaching phonics. Experts say that you want to see your child's phonics instruction described as "explicit" and " systematic." This is more effective, according to research, than an " incidental" approach, which means teaching phonics as students encounter unknown words. It's probably a good sign if your child's school uses the term "structured literacy," said Kate Mayer, a former teacher and member of Everyone Reads T/E, a parent advocacy group in Pennsylvania. That's the term used by the International Dyslexia Association to describe reading instruction that teaches children decoding and the sound structure of spoken words. There's a table that compares the instructional elements of scientifically based reading instruction with the elements of whole-language approaches on page 18 of this article.

Several people suggested asking to visit your child's classroom during reading time or offering to volunteer. "Even if a curriculum is sanctioned by the district, each teacher may use a different approach," said Jessica Hamman, founder of Educator Lab, a company that designs courses for teachers. When you're in the classroom, pay attention to what's on the walls, said Louisa Moats, a reading expert quoted in our story and documentary. "Is there a poster encouraging students to guess at words from the context? Is there a 'word wall' with words listed by the alphabet, regardless of the sounds those letters represent? Those are not good signs," Moats said. And pay attention to what the kids are doing, said Cassie Seiple, a parent and former teacher in New Orleans. "Do they talk about letter sounds and patterns? Are they saying each sound and sounding out the letters or are they memorizing and guessing?"

You want to see some direct instruction in your child's classroom. That means teacher-led lessons. This is a big point of contention in the debates about reading instruction. Whole-language approaches to reading instruction are rooted in strong beliefs that children learn best when they're allowed to direct their own learning. But a recent meta-analysis of 50 years of research shows that direct instruction is remarkably effective. Something you don't want to see, according to Nora Chahbazi, founder of the Ounce of Prevention Reading Center in Flushing, Michigan, is teachers "asking students in K/1 (or struggling readers of any age) to read independently and read more when they haven't been taught HOW to read."

Look at your child's work too. "Are they bringing home rings of words to practice and memorize?" Mayer said. "Are they studying weekly spelling words that don't follow specific patterns? Are they bringing home reading strategy sheets that tell them to look at the pictures to figure out the words in text? All of these things would indicate a program that is not using the science of reading." You may also be able to assess what's up with your child's reading instruction by asking him or her, in about first-grade, to sound out or spell a nonsense word, said Jeannine Herron, a neuropsychologist in California. "How would you write the word NIM (rhymes with HIM)? Or BAP (rhymes with CAP)?" she said. "If he has been taught to recognize words by their visual appearance, he may not be able to sound out a nonsense word like this."

Finally - or perhaps to start - I recommend asking teachers and administrators this question: How do children learn to read? The answer can help you uncover the core beliefs at work in an approach to reading instruction (there's a helpful quiz about reading beliefs here). You don't want teachers or administrators telling you that children learn by being read to or that reading comes naturally with lots of practice. The science shows clearly that learning to read is not a natural process and that children need to be taught how to decode words.
2. What do I do if my child's school is not teaching reading in ways backed up by science?
Pray your child is one of the kids who doesn't need much instruction. That's basically what a bunch of parents and experts told me. If your child is struggling, "find help," said Tracey Ely, who runs a dyslexia resource center in South Carolina. "It is important to get help early. Don't wait and let him fail." (For more advice on what to do if your child is struggling, see question 4).

What to do if reading instruction doesn't line up with the science? "I honestly don't really know," Seiple said. "Our son's school was very opposed to phonics, saying it was boring and too slow. We have moved schools twice and are still paying a tutor." Trying to get schools to change can be a frustrating experience. "I've found that as soon as I start asking questions about curriculum the school folks get prickly," Mayer said.

Talk to other parents about reading, get together with them, said Alison Dryfoos-Mazzie, a member of Decoding Dyslexia Pennsylvania. "Try to start a group to advocate for something appropriate for your children. There is more power in groups."

"The most important thing for parents is to make (reading) a pleasurable activity for children. You are not their reading teacher. Do not focus on the mechanics of reading."

John Alexander, executive director of Groves Academy, a private school in Minnesota for children with learning disabilities, said the same thing. "Have parents start a parent advocacy group and bring in speakers who know how reading should be taught," he said. "Ideally, you would have teachers join the group."

This is an important point. Try to be on the same team with your child's teacher, advised Lisa McBride, whose daughter has dyslexia. "Teachers are usually doing what they are told," she said. "If they do not feel personally attacked, they may be very forthcoming on what they are being asked to do versus what they may feel your child really needs."

But be persistent. "People need to get involved and get active," Hembling said. "My school district started implementing the same changes they made in Bethlehem, Pa., but it wasn't without a fight. We went to the school board, met with administrators and put the pressure on."

"Most bureaucracies are slow to make changes or adopt new programs," said Jan Wasowicz, who moderates a listserv for researchers and educators trying to improve reading instruction. "Take it to the highest authority. Join forces with other parents. Educate yourself on different programs and best practices supported by science. Information is power."
3. I want to do some phonics and phonemic awareness activities with my child at home. What do I do?
I got a lot of different responses to this question. Some people chimed in with specific books and programs they recommend. "There are some terrific ones out there," said Linda Phelps, a parent and former school administrator in Massachusetts. "But do you understand what you will be teaching or reinforcing?"

Teaching phonics well requires good training. "I still think the most important thing for parents to do when it comes to reading is to make it a pleasurable activity for their children," Mayer said. "You are not their reading teacher. Do not focus on the mechanics of reading. Fill your house with books, show them that there are all kinds of reading by modeling it, reading aloud to them, singing songs, playing word games and talking, talking, talking!"

Judi Dodson, a LETRS trainer (LETRS training was featured in the documentary), said parents should keep in mind that reading comprehension depends not just on decoding skills but on vocabulary and background knowledge too. Parents play a key role in exposing their children to lots of language and information. That said, there are some specific things parents and caregivers can do to help develop a child's phonemic awareness. "Reading nursery rhymes and poetry, singing rhyming songs can be very helpful to developing a child's ear for listening to and noticing patterns of rhyming and alliteration in oral language," Dodson said. She also suggested doing things like comparing and contrasting the sounds in words. For example, ask your child which word doesn't belong in groups of words such as: mat/pat/cat/man or mat/man/mop/sat.

"Play around with words," Cassidy said. You can do listening games where you have your child take away syllables or sounds, she said. "For example, say 'plate.' Now say 'plate,' but don't say /p/. What's left?"

There are nonprofit organizations that provide specific resources. Several people recommended Reading Rockets, a public media initiative to provide information on how young children learn to read. The website includes several helpful tip sheets including Activities to Encourage Speech and Language Development, Playing with Word Sounds, and Making Friends with Phonemes. Wasowicz recommended Beginning with Babble, a free mobile phone app that gives parents daily tips and activities matched to the age of their child. Several people also suggested Understood, a nonprofit that focuses specifically on children with learning and attention issues. On the website, you can answer a few questions about your child and get customized information and suggestions for things to do and places to go for help. There is also this useful guide, A Child Becomes a Reader, from the National Institute for Literacy.

4. I think my kid is struggling with reading. How do I know? What do I do?
It can be hard to know if your child is struggling. Understood has a checklist of what dyslexia looks like at different ages to help you determine if your child might have a problem that needs intervention. There's also a free dyslexia screener here. If you suspect a problem, don't ignore it. "I always tell parents to trust your gut," Hembling said. "You know your child best."

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires school districts to identify and evaluate all children with learning disabilities. Ask, in writing, for an evaluation. "You're not asking for anything that the federal law does not require your public school to do," said Brett Tingley, a mother in Ohio who was featured in our 2017 documentary about why children with dyslexia have a hard time getting help in school. "Don't be afraid to ruffle feathers. This is your child. If you won't fight for your child, what will you fight for?" (This website has good information about what your legal rights are.)

Schools may put you off or tell you your child will catch up. "When you tell them you think your child has dyslexia, will they say the word 'dyslexia?'" Tingley said. "Do they actually have any kids identified in the district as dyslexic?" Ask for data. "How do you know my student is on track in reading?" Mayer said. "May I see their benchmark data including where they are performing compared to their peers? A huge red flag is when the school refuses or deflects your request for any type of data."

If the school won't help, and you have the financial means to do it, you may want to get your child privately tested. This is terrible advice to have to give, because private testing can cost thousands of dollars, making it impossible for many low and moderate-income families. But there may be low-cost options in your community. "Consider using a group associated with a college/university that may charge reduced fees to secure clients for their graduate school students," McBride said. "If so, make sure that there is a well-qualified psychologist/ neuropsychologist who will oversee this testing."

The bottom line is that early intervention is important. "Parents can spend months or years trying to get a school to improve their instructional approach, losing precious time for their struggling reader," said Sandie Barrie Blackley, co-founder of the Dyslexia Services Foundation. "For the child's sake, the best advice is don't wait. Seek help outside the school."

"You could face folks who call you the 'crazy mom.' We plug through it, play nice and hope that the work we are doing will spare some kids from the pain and suffering many kids have endured in our district."

Consider hiring a private tutor. "Borrow money from family, take an extra shift at work," Tingley said. "There is no time to waste." It can be difficult to find a good tutor or to even know what you're looking for. "Recognize that tutors are not licensed," McBride warned. She and several other people suggested looking for a tutor certified by the Academy of Orton Gillingham or the Academic Language Therapy Association. Jule McCombes-Tolis, chief academic officer for the International Dyslexia Association who was in our 2017 documentary, recommended that families use the provider directory available through the Center for Effective Reading Instruction. There are also specialized private schools for students with dyslexia, but tuition at these schools can be $30,000 a year or more. Another option is to keep your child in public school, fight for appropriate services, and consider a summer camp for children with dyslexia, McBride said. She pointed to this list of camps and clinics.

Something else to be aware of is the emotional strain that can come from having dyslexia, especially if a child is not getting the right kind of help. "Dyslexic children can often feel defeated, depressed, angry, or scared," Dryfoos-Mazzie said. If you can afford a tutor, "it's best to have a tutor who is compassionate and understands a child's anxiety, frustrations, and worries." If your child's school is providing specialized instruction, educate yourself about what your child is getting. McBride pointed out that sometimes schools will hire paraprofessionals who are not licensed or fully qualified to work with your child. She recommended asking the school how the paraprofessional was trained and how many hours of instruction the person had "to ensure they can provide the necessary reinforcement to the child in more than one way. (Not 'drill and kill')."

I recommend contacting the dyslexia advocates in your community, even if your child does not have dyslexia. They know that what their children need in high doses - early, explicit, systematic phonics instruction - benefits all kids, and yet it's missing in many schools. Decoding Dyslexia, which has chapters in all 50 states, is a parent advocacy group that has been very helpful to me in my reporting. Many of the Decoding Dyslexia parents I've talked to have the financial means to send their children to specialized private schools. In fact, I was once at a Decoding Dyslexia meeting in Maryland and realized that all but one of the mothers in the room had already moved their children to private schools. The one child who remained in public school had just graduated from high school. So, technically, all these mothers were fighting for other people's children. And what they're fighting for is not just better services for children with dyslexia but better core reading instruction for all kids.

"It is not an easy process!" Mayer said. "Know if you embark on this path [trying to change reading instruction] you could possibly face folks who call you the 'crazy mom.' We plug through it, play nice and hope that the work we are doing will spare some kids from the pain and suffering many kids have endured in our district. We are making little bits of change but know nothing will truly happen until the people who are leading the district start believing there is a problem."

"Demand more from your school administration," Cassidy said. "Donate to scholarship programs so that middle and lower-income students may also afford tutoring when the schools are falling short."

"I think all the top-level down work has been done," Tingley said. "Researchers have done the brain science. Legislators have passed special-ed law at the federal and state levels. The missing piece is the bottom-up piece. Forming parent groups and taking action is very effective and can lead to amazing results. [Parents] have to force the school board and the administration to provide the appropriate professional development for teachers until the colleges of education do their job.

"I commend any parent who will stand up for all children. It takes time and energy, but you will be as proud of this effort as any in your lifetime," she said. "This is a civil rights issue. We are robbing millions of children of their future."

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What to do if your child's school isn't teaching reading right?

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Listen to this audio documentary on the Educate podcast. Subscribe now. In early September, we released an audio documentary and accompanying article called Hard Words: Why aren't kids being taught to read? The story documented that the scientific research about how children learn to read is not well understood by many teachers and is not guiding reading instruction in many schools.

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Hard to Read:  How American schools fail kids with dyslexia

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Hard to Read:  How American schools fail kids with dyslexia

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by Emily Hanford
Sept. 11, 2017

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Read an interview with neuroscientist Guinevere Eden.

"We knew something wasn't right," said Billy's mom, Maggie Gibson.

"You can tell things are off, but you don't know specifically what," said Rob, Billy's father.

The Gibsons, from Baltimore County, Maryland, have five kids. All of them have dyslexia. They know, because they paid thousands of dollars for private testing.

But when the Gibsons showed the test results to their children's schools, administrators didn't buy it, says Rob. "The schools essentially said, 'Yeah, we understand this is a test showing abnormalities from a reputed institution that recommends a child with dyslexia have this, that and the other. And, oh, we don't agree with it.' And when we got to that disagreement it was almost like we were disagreeing over reality."

The Gibsons gave APM Reports an audio recording of the meeting where they discussed the test results with staff at their son Eddie's school. In the recording, a staff member says, "We do not suspect a learning disability."

The Gibsons wanted their children to have Individualized Education Plans, or IEPs. Those are the specialized education plans that students with disabilities who are behind in school are entitled to by federal law.

But in the recording, the school staff says Eddie can't have a disability because he has passing grades and average standardized test scores.

More than a dozen families across the country interviewed by APM Reports reported getting into similar fights with their child's school. Parents say their children figure out ways to compensate for their dyslexia and get by in school, but they aren't being taught to read. Children with dyslexia need specialized reading instruction.

"I would just constantly have these anxiety attacks and it got to a point where I refused to go to school."
- Billy Gibson

But specialized instruction is expensive. The average cost to educate a student in public school is about $12,500, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The cost to educate a child receiving special education services can be more than twice that. When the federal special education law first went into effect in 1975, Congress committed to covering 40 percent of the extra cost of educating children with disabilities. But the federal government is only covering slightly more than 15 percent. States and local districts pay for the rest.

That's one reason schools have avoided using the word dyslexia, according to Fran Bowman, a former special education teacher who now runs an educational services company that works with school districts to train teachers. "They would say, 'We don't use the word dyslexia.' Because once you open Pandora's box, you have to serve those children."

In other words, if schools acknowledge a student has dyslexia, they may be legally obligated to provide special education.

Six special education directors from around the country interviewed by APM Reports denied their schools were refusing to use the word dyslexia to keep students out of special ed.

Kevin Gorman, director of special education in Upper Arlington, Ohio, and a former school principal in another Ohio district, said schools were avoiding the word because it wasn't a term used by the state on IEP forms. Instead, the state used the umbrella term "specific learning disability." Gorman explained that schools are so concerned about adhering to the letter of the law that they are reluctant to use terms that do not appear on official paperwork.

Avoiding the word was such a problem in schools across the country that in 2015 the U.S. Department of Education issued a special letter reminding schools that not only can they use the word dyslexia, they should use the word if it can help them tailor an appropriate education plan for a student.

It's a legal requirement for schools to identify all children who have disabilities and provide them an "appropriate" education. But many schools have resisted the approaches to reading instruction that students with dyslexia need - and that would help all children read better - because of a long-running dispute about how to teach children to read.

The reading wars

You can trace the debate in the United States about how to teach kids to read all the way back to Horace Mann, the father of the public schools movement. In the 1800s, Mann railed against the idea of teaching kids that letters represent sounds. He believed children would better understand what they were reading if they first learned to read whole words.

This came to be known as the "whole language" approach. On the other side of the debate are people who say children must be explicitly taught how sounds correlate with letters. This is commonly referred to as the "phonics" approach.

The argument over which approach is best has been intense and political, with phonics cast as a traditional, conservative approach. Think of children sitting in front of a blackboard, sounding out words as a teacher points to the letters that represent each sound.

Whole language, on the other hand, holds that learning to read is a natural process and that kids don't need explicit instruction. Expose them to lots of good books and they will learn to read. That approach is seen as the more liberal, progressive way.

As with many ideas in education, there have been big pendulum shifts over the decades. Whole language was big in the 1920s, for example, as progressive education became influential. The pendulum swung back toward phonics in the 1960s. By the 1980s, whole language was popular again.

Bowman, the former special education teacher, got extensive training in phonics in the 1970s and used that approach early in her teaching career. But she says she soon got a supervisor who told her she wasn't allowed to teach phonics. "You should be teaching by the entire word, instead of these little sounds," she recalls the supervisor telling her.

Bowman says it's easier to train teachers to use the whole language method than to train them to use phonics. She thinks that's one reason whole language has been so attractive. "School districts were like 'Wow! We can just give you a bunch of books!'"

Proponents of whole language say the approach is more than that. They promote a set of strategies that emphasize comprehension, engagement, and helping children to develop a love of literature.

But by the late 1990s, there was rising panic in the United States that too many kids were not reading well. Scores on the National Assessment for Educational Progress showed most students were not reading proficiently.

In 1997, Congress called for a National Reading Panel to determine how best to teach reading. It reviewed more than 100,000 studies and in 2000, the panel published a 449-page report that was a crushing blow to the whole language movement. There was no evidence to show whole language worked and lots of evidence that teaching children the relationship among sounds, letters and spelling patterns improves reading achievement.

This is for all kids, not just those with dyslexia.

Andrea Rowson was teaching in a public school in Ohio when the report was released, but she says she didn't learn about the findings until years later. "What happens in public education is a lot of initiatives come through, a lot of information gets thrown at schools. New regulations, new this, new that," she said. "And I think it was just one of those things where (schools) said 'OK' and didn't really realize how huge it was."

'I'm not going to be anything. I don't have any dreams'

In 2012 when the public schools in Baltimore County refused to give the Gibson children IEPs, Rob and Maggie decided to hire a lawyer. "All we wanted was to secure their right to learn in public school," said Maggie.

Their son Billy was in middle school and struggling. "It just got so overwhelming," he said. "I would just constantly have these anxiety attacks and it got to a point where I refused to go to school."

Trying to get him the help he needed for his dyslexia was turning into a long and contentious process. Maggie and Rob felt that for Billy and his older sister, time was running out. They decided to send them to the Jemicy School, a private school for students with language-based learning differences in Owings Mills, Maryland.

Jemicy has about 380 students in grades one through 12. The hallways are covered in student artwork and there's a woodworking shop where students can take geometry. For students who struggle with written language, learning by doing is especially helpful.

Class sizes at Jemicy are capped at 12. The school also provides intensive reading remediation in small-group tutoring sessions.

In a recent tutoring session, Josie and Christopher - fifth-graders in their first year at Jemicy - were seated at a table with a teacher. They were working on the letter combination double vowel "oo."

"I talk to a lot of upper-class white families who were able to take their kids out and send them to private school. Those kids are doing well now, and we didn't have that opportunity."
- Pam Guest

"What are the two sounds that 'oo' make?" the teacher asked.

Christopher responded confidently with the long vowel sound that "oo" makes in the word "school." But there's another sound "oo" makes. Josie and Christopher didn't catch on.

"'Uh' as in 'book,'" said the teacher.

This tutoring is based on an approach known as Orton-Gillingham, named after Samuel Orton and Anna Gillingham, early 20th century pioneers in dyslexia research and remediation. They figured out that children with dyslexia struggle to understand how sounds and letters correspond. To teach them to read, they need to be explicitly taught the rules of the way written language works. Orton and Gillingham developed a systematic approach for doing this. Their ideas form the basis for a number of effective instructional approaches in use today.

When Billy Gibson started at Jemicy as a ninth grader, he wasn't sure he would finish high school. His dream was to be an artist, but his middle school art teacher gave him C's because he didn't follow written directions. Billy went into Jemicy thinking, "I'm not going to be anything. I don't have any dreams."

But Jemicy's small classes and intensive reading instruction helped him catch up and gave him confidence he'd never felt in school. On his first day, he says an art teacher noticed him doodling and told him she thought he could be a great artist. "You should take my class," Billy remembers her saying to him. "I won't give up on you."

Billy graduated from Jemicy in 2017. He's now studying 3D computer animation at the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida. His goal is to work in the film industry. "Hopefully someday you'll be in the movie theater and see my name on the credits of the big screen," he said.

More than $60,000 a year

Billy's mom Maggie noticed a difference at Jemicy right away. As the parent of kids with dyslexia in public school, she says you get used to being in fight mode. "You're fighting for it to be recognized that your kid needs X, Y and Z," she said. "And then you go into Jemicy and you have a teacher conference and the teachers sit down and say, 'You know, we think your child would benefit from this, this and this. And we notice that your child needs' - whatever it is. And you're like, 'Oh my gosh! We're speaking the same language. We're all noticing the same thing.'"

But to send two kids to Jemicy cost more than $60,000 a year. Maggie and Rob are fortunate: He's a physician and they got financial help from their children's grandparents. But five private school tuitions weren't in their budget. So, with their lawyer, the Gibsons kept fighting with the Baltimore County Public Schools to try to get their three other kids better help.

The Gibsons eventually got the school system to pay for two of their children to go to Baltimore Lab School, a private school for students with learning disabilities. The Gibsons don't think they would have gotten that if they hadn't hired an attorney. Getting what you need for a kid with dyslexia is a rich man's game, says Maggie. The Gibsons estimate their family has spent more than $350,000 - including legal fees, private tutoring and tuition - to get their five dyslexic kids what they needed to be successful in school.

Without help from grandparents, Maggie says she and Rob probably couldn't have made private school work. "What does a person do that doesn't have the luxury of other people to help them?" she said. "What do you do?"

Pam Guest, for example, did not have the financial means to send her son Dayne to private school. "I talk to a lot of upper-class white families who were able to take their kids out and send them to private school. Those kids are doing well now, and they're able to go to college," she said. "And we didn't have that opportunity."

Dayne went to the Baltimore County Public Schools, too. There's no evidence that Baltimore County has more of a problem than other public school systems when it comes to identifying and providing proper instruction to students with dyslexia. But officials with the Baltimore County Schools are now admitting they have a problem. "We need to do better," said Rebecca Rider, who's been director of special education for the Baltimore County Public Schools since 2014. Under her leadership, the school system has begun to train teachers in Orton-Gillingham. Before this effort began in 2016, the county schools did not have anyone trained to provide this instruction.

Stephen Cowles, a lawyer for BCPS, said the school system is making more of an effort to identify students with dyslexia. As a result, he says the county is paying for more students to go to private schools. In the 2016 fiscal year, the county paid nearly $40 million dollars for students with disabilities who could not be appropriately served in public schools to go to specialized private schools. BCPS couldn't say how much of that money is being spent on students with dyslexia.

But helping students with dyslexia is not just about expanding special education services. Research suggests that if students with dyslexia got effective early reading instruction in their regular classrooms, some of them may not need intensive, specialized instruction. The problem is that many teachers do not know how to teach reading effectively.

Thousands of teacher preparation programs

In 2000, the National Reading Panel identified five key components of effective reading instruction. Ten years later, the U.S. Department of Education decided to find out whether people coming out of teacher preparation programs had learned those five components.

New teachers could correctly answer only about half the questions on a multiple-choice test. They rated their own preparation in how to teach reading as below "moderate."

In 2016, the National Council on Teacher Quality, a think tank in Washington, D.C., analyzed syllabi from undergraduate elementary teacher preparation programs and found that fewer than 40 percent covered all the components of effective reading instruction. And that was a big improvement from 2014 when NCTQ found just 17 percent of teacher preparation programs taught all five components.

What are teachers learning about how to teach children to read?

"We learned a lot about creating a literature-rich environment," said Rowson, the Ohio teacher. She got her initial training in the 1980s and says she learned nothing about phonics; in fact, she says her professors were against the idea of explicitly teaching children the relationship between sounds and letters. She learned the whole language approach.

Rowson says she didn't learn how to teach children to read until she was trained in Orton-Gillingham. She now trains teachers in Upper Arlington, Ohio, a school district that has significantly changed how it teaches reading in response to a formal complaint filed by a group of parents.

Amelia Smith, a teacher in Upper Arlington who got her degree in elementary and special education in 2012, says by then there was recognition that phonics was important. "We knew what it was but we weren't taught how to teach it," she said.

Upper Arlington

Read about an Ohio school district that changed the way all kids are taught to read.

One reason teachers are not being better prepared to teach reading is there's still an ideological fight going on about whole language versus phonics, according to Jule McCombes-Tolis, chief academic officer for educator training initiatives at the International Dyslexia Association. She spent more than two decades as a professor in teacher preparation programs. "The division in higher ed in reading is alive and well," she said.

McCombes-Tolis says in the wake of the National Reading Panel report, many teacher educators who believed in the whole language approach promoted the idea of "balanced literacy" instead.

But balanced literacy is basically whole language with some phonics mixed in, says Tim Shanahan, a literacy expert who served on the National Reading Panel. "Balanced literacy began as the notion of a different attempt to try to settle the reading wars. It's supposed to be the best of both worlds."

Shanahan says what's wrong with balanced literacy is that it combines a whole bunch of things that don't work with a little bit of what does work, and that's not good reading instruction. He thinks a big problem with teacher preparation programs is that many of the people who are teaching the reading instruction courses don't know the science of reading that well.

"The folks who teach these courses range in their knowledge dramatically," he said. Enroll in a teacher preparation program and your instructor might have a Ph.D. and be familiar with the latest research, says Shanahan. But "you could have somebody who - this person teaches four other things for us and we'll give them an extra course in reading instruction. They have last year's syllabus and they do their best," he said.

There are thousands of teacher preparation programs in the United States and there's very little oversight of them. In higher education, the faculty typically controls the curriculum. There is no one authority to hold accountable for how teachers in America are trained.

States do have some power and many are trying to exert more control over what gets taught in teacher preparation programs as well as what is happening in public schools when it comes to students with dyslexia.

As of this month, 41 states have some sort of dyslexia law, regulation or resolution. The laws and regulations vary widely. Some require graduates of teacher preparation programs to pass science of reading tests; others encourage public schools to provide teacher training on how to identify dyslexia.

33 states have passed dyslexia laws since 2012

An analysis by APM Reports shows that while most states have taken some kind of action to address the needs of kids with dyslexia, the laws often go unenforced and unfunded. Read more.

Sources: LegiScan, Decoding Dyslexia and staff research

Most of these laws have passed in the past few years partly due to parent advocacy groups pushing for change.

Pam Guest is a leader of one of these groups, Decoding Dyslexia-Maryland. Decoding Dyslexia has chapters in all 50 states. In Maryland, the group succeeded in getting a bill through the legislature to establish a task force that reviewed how students in the state are identified and treated for dyslexia. Now the group wants funding for a pilot program to demonstrate best practices when it comes to not only helping students with dyslexia, but to teaching all children how to read.

Even though it's too late for her son, Guest says she's determined to change things so what happened to Dayne won't happen to other kids.

"It's simple," she said. "Teachers must be able to teach children how to read."

Update: Oct. 24, 2017 The map and story have been updated to reflect new analysis of state laws pertaining to dyslexia.

"Hard to Read" is one of three audio documentaries this season from the Educate podcast - stories about education, opportunity, and how people learn.

CORRESPONDENT/PRODUCER
Emily Hanford

RESEARCH AND PRODUCTION FELLOWS
Jeffrey Bissoy-Mattis
Lila Cherneff
Josh Marcus

PRODUCTION HELP
Josie Fan
Liz Lyon
Chris Julin

Special thanks: Amare, Curtis, Forrest, Hadassah, Inez, Jordan, Norah, Oliver and Ryan.

Support for this program comes from Lumina Foundation and the Spencer Foundation.

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How American schools fail kids with dyslexia

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There are proven ways to help people with dyslexia learn to read, and a federal law that's supposed to ensure schools provide kids with help. But across the country, public schools are denying children proper treatment and often failing to identify them with dyslexia in the first place.

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In Ohio, parents demand change for dyslexic kids

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In Ohio, parents demand change for dyslexic kids

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Hard to Read: How American schools fail kids with dyslexia.

Other parents with children in Upper Arlington schools at the time described similar experiences.

When Christine Beattie went to the staff at Barrington and said her son Neil wasn't learning to read, "They wouldn't acknowledge that he had a problem," she said. "They wouldn't say the word 'dyslexia.'"

The same thing happened to Brett Tingley and Debbie Segor. Their kids weren't reading, and they thought dyslexia might be the issue, but school staff dismissed the idea.

Each parent felt a bit crazy for thinking something was wrong with their kids when the schools were telling them there wasn't a problem. "You trust your (school) district, and you look to them as the experts," said Tingley.

'They let my children suffer'

After the meeting where school staff dismissed the idea that her kids might have dyslexia, Long took things into her own hands. She got training in Orton-Gillingham, an approach to reading instruction proven effective for people with dyslexia. She learned how to administer a dyslexia screening test. And she read everything she could get her hands on. Long figured the school was being stubborn because teachers and administrators just didn't know much about dyslexia.

Then one day in 2010, sitting in a chair in her family room with her laptop out, she typed "dyslexia" and "Upper Arlington" into Google. "And all of these hits come up with a family named the James family," she said.

She clicked on one and started reading. It was a letter written by Cameron James to the superintendent of the Upper Arlington schools in 1996. It describes the ordeal he and his wife went through trying to get the schools to help their son Joe with his dyslexia.

The Jameses ultimately gave up on the idea that the Upper Arlington schools would teach their son to read. When Joe was in fourth grade, they sent him to a private school that specializes in teaching students with dyslexia. The letter was their request for the Upper Arlington schools to reimburse them for tuition. Federal law requires schools to provide children with disabilities a "free appropriate public education." Since Joe's education was not appropriate in the James's view, and getting him an appropriate education was not free, they wanted the school district to pay for it.

Reading the letter, Long was filled with sadness and rage. Several staff members who had dealt with the James case were still working in the school district. The idea that they didn't know about dyslexia was preposterous. "Upper Arlington knew," she said. "They knew and they let my children suffer."

Filing a complaint

Since the James's experience resembled what her family was going through, Long thought there must be others.

She asked her kids: Who are the other students struggling with reading? She got in touch with their parents and invited them to a meeting at her house in August 2010.

"My street was lined with cars," she said. More than 30 people showed up.

"We went around the room," said Tingley, who was at the meeting. "Everyone had experienced the same thing."

Their dyslexic kids were not being identified or given appropriate help. The parents decided to work together as a team, pooled their resources and hired a lawyer.

"I was not surprised that there was a group of students with dyslexia who were not getting the kind of instruction that they really needed," said their lawyer, Kerry Agins, who has represented several parents with dyslexic kids. Agins says typically, parents fight special education cases alone, seeking remedies one by one. Parents rarely fight cases as a group.

"It is very difficult when you have a law like the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to find an issue that is systemic in nature," she said.

But Agins thinks public schools failing to address the needs of kids with dyslexia is a systemic issue, in Ohio and across the country. She urged the Upper Arlington parents to file a group complaint with the Ohio Department of Education.

Filing a complaint with the state is one way parents can allege a violation of special education law. The other way is to file a request for due process. Due process requests often end in settlements and commonly come with gag orders, which is what happened in the James case.

Agins's advice to the Upper Arlington parents was to file a state complaint because if they won, it could send a message to other school districts that they need to change what they're doing for students with dyslexia.

Nineteen people signed the group complaint, including parents, students and graduates of the Upper Arlington public schools.

The complaint alleged the school district was failing to identify students with learning disabilities. Federal special education law puts the onus on schools to find and evaluate every child with a disability. The complaint also alleged the Upper Arlington schools were using an evaluation and intervention process that delayed students' eligibility for special education services.

In August 2011, the Ohio Department of Education found the Upper Arlington Schools in violation of federal and state law when it came to promptly and properly identifying students with learning disabilities and finding them eligible for special education.

"We felt vindicated," said Beattie. "Like, we aren't crazy. We know what we're talking about."

A belief in whole language

In its decision, the Ohio Department of Education ordered a series of corrective actions. It included requiring Upper Arlington to train teachers and staff on how to identify and evaluate students with learning disabilities and how to teach children with dyslexia how to read.

Neither the district superintendent nor the special education director in charge at the time would agree to an interview for this story, leaving a critical question unanswered: Why didn't teachers and staff already have this training?

As for the unwillingness to identify students with dyslexia, Joe Keith, the school psychologist in charge of evaluating students for disabilities at Barrington Elementary when the parents filed the complaint, points to a lack of resources.

"A lot of the complaints you hear about schools - well, they're public schools and they only have so much. Knowing how many reading specialists you have, how many tutors that you have... You know, it's not an endless supply," Keith said, refusing to elaborate.

Agins, the attorney for the parents, didn't uncover any evidence of budget pressure but knows from her experience on other cases that finances are often one reason kids aren't identified. Nationally, the average cost to educate a student in special education is more than twice the cost to educate a child in public school.

"I have started to call it not dyslexia but 'dysteachia.' It's the teachers who are not giving the right kind of instruction." Brett Tingley

In Upper Arlington, there was another issue that may have contributed to how students with dyslexia were being educated: The school system was committed to the whole language approach when it came to teaching children how to read, says Keith, despite overwhelming evidence that whole language is ineffective. The whole language approach is especially harmful for students with dyslexia, research shows, because their brains require they be explicitly taught the ways that sounds and letters correspond.

Keith explained that the district's belief in the whole language approach meant that "when you had a group of students who needed a different approach, we did not necessarily have that readily available."

Parents claim the school district was blinded by its belief in whole language. "They thought whole language worked for everybody, so when they came across a kid who was struggling to read, it's like it was the kid's fault or something," said Long.

"I have started to call it not dyslexia but 'dysteachia,'" said Tingley. "The issue is not with the kid. The kid does learn differently, but the kid can learn to read. It's the teachers who are not giving the right kind of instruction."

Changing the way all kids learn to read

The parents who filed the complaint in Upper Arlington were emboldened by their win and wanted the school district to go beyond what the state was requiring, including screening every student entering the district for dyslexia. The school district now does this.

What is dyslexia?

Read an interview with neuroscientist Guinevere Eden.

Additionally, parents convinced the school district to change how all kids are taught to read.

Recently, in a first- and second-grade classroom at Barrington Elementary, teacher Ashley Stechschulte held up a series of cards with words on them, and the children repeated after her as she sounded out the first letter sound.

"O Octopus ah!" the kids yelled.

The class soon moved to more complex letter-sound combinations. They discussed the word "sock." Stechschulte asked what the letter combination "ck" is called.

"A digraph," answered a student. A digraph is two letters that appear together but make just one sound.

Stechschulte then asked the class to consider the difference between the digraph "ck" and the digraph "wh," as in the word "whistle."

"Who can tell me what's the big difference between these two digraphs?" Stechschulte asked, and a little boy quickly answered.

The teacher was using "Fundations," a program based on the Wilson Reading System, a structured, phonics-based method that borrows heavily from the Orton-Gillingham approach. Fundations is commonly used with kids who are struggling to learn to read, but Upper Arlington has chosen to use this approach with all students to try to prevent reading failure.

For students who show signs of dyslexia on the screening test, there is more intensive, one-on-one tutoring available.

'They get it, and it's just unbelievable'

Kelli and Mark Trinoskey moved their family to Upper Arlington in 2016 because of the support the district now provides to students with dyslexia.

They lived in another Columbus suburb but felt their twin daughters - one who has dyslexia and the other who has an audio processing disorder that results in similar struggles with reading - were not getting the help they needed in the public schools. Within days of starting school in Upper Arlington, their daughter with dyslexia was getting one-on-one tutoring three days a week from a teacher trained in Orton-Gillingham.

"They get it, and it's just unbelievable," said Kelli, referring to the Upper Arlington Schools.

But the changes in Upper Arlington came too late for the Long kids.

The two oldest - Emily and Erik - graduated from Upper Arlington High School without ever getting the kind of reading instruction they needed. Long and her husband were determined to make sure that didn't happen to their younger girls. So they sent them to Marburn Academy, a private school in Columbus for students with learning disabilities.

The youngest, Caroline, started at Marburn in first grade in 2009. Within a few weeks, Long says she was reading. "Really reading," she said. "Not looking at pictures - there were no pictures - and not guessing. She was pairing letters with sounds and blending the sounds together to sound out the words on the page."

Long says by the holidays that year, Caroline was sitting on her oldest sister's lap and reading a book to her. Emily, who was 14, looked up at her mom and said, "Why didn't anyone ever teach me to read like that?"

"That's a very good question, Em," Long replied.

The 2017 season of four education documentaries can be heard via the Educate podcast.
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BACK TO MAIN STORY How American schools fail kids with dyslexia

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In Ohio, parents demand change for dyslexic kids

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Hard to Read: How American schools fail kids with dyslexia. Other parents with children in Upper Arlington schools at the time described similar experiences. When Christine Beattie went to the staff at Barrington and said her son Neil wasn't learning to read, "They wouldn't acknowledge that he had a problem," she said.

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Resources and extended reading material for the documentary Hard to Read.

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There are proven ways to help people with dyslexia learn to read, and a federal law that's supposed to ensure schools provide kids with help. But across the country, public schools are denying children proper treatment and often failing to identify them with dyslexia in the first place.

Organizations with more information about dyslexia

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There are proven ways to help people with dyslexia learn to read, and a federal law that's supposed to ensure schools provide kids with help. But across the country, public schools are denying children proper treatment and often failing to identify them with dyslexia in the first place.