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Looking for more? All of the tools and resources below are free for the public to download and use to support reading and literacy instruction. Each are based upon research evidence and designed for teachers, principals, families, and other education leaders. We invite you to explore these resources to improve learning and achievement in your schools and communities.

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Looking for more? All of the tools and resources below are free for the public to download and use to support reading and literacy instruction. Each are based upon research evidence and designed for teachers, principals, families, and other education leaders. We invite you to explore these resources to improve learning and achievement in your schools and communities.

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A bilingual site for educators and families of English language learners

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New Changes to Ohio's Dyslexia Support Laws

House Bill 33 of the 135th General Assembly included several important updates to Ohio's dyslexia support laws.

Professional Development (Ohio Revised Code 3319.077)

The following dyslexia professional development requirements apply to teachers in grades K-3 and special education teachers in grades K-12 who are employed by a city, local or exempted village school district, community school or STEM school.

Teachers hired before April 12, 2021, who provide instruction to students in the following grade bands must complete the required professional development in accordance with the following timeline:

By the beginning of the 2023-2024 school year: Teachers of grades K-1, including special education teachers.

By Sept. 15 of the 2024-2025 school year: Teachers of grades 2-3, including special education teachers.

By Sept. 15 of the 2025-2026 school year: Special education teachers of students in grades 4-12.

Teachers hired after April 12, 2021, who provide instruction to students in the grade bands outlined above must complete the required professional development by the later of the aforementioned dates or two calendar years after the hiring date (unless the teacher completed the professional development while employed by a different district or school).

Dyslexia Screening (ORC 3323.251)

A district or school is not required to administer a tier one dyslexia screening measure to a student in grades K-6 who transfers into the district or school midyear if the student's records indicate a screening was administered to the student by the district or school from which the student transferred during that year.

Additional updates for screening transfer students can be found on the Dyslexia Screening webpage.

The 2023-2024 List of Approved Universal Dyslexia Screeners is now available

The list and detailed information are available at the List of Approved Assessments page on the Department's website.

A streamlined list of approved assessments that meet the requirements of tier 1 dyslexia screening and/or the K-3 diagnostic can be found here.

Administering Literacy Assessments for students with Low incidence disabilities and complex communication needs

This document provides resources and recommendations for accommodations and scaffolds districts may use when administering district wide literacy screenings and benchmarks or reading diagnostics. These can be used when administering the required tier 1 dyslexia screener, as well as the reading diagnostic required under the Third Grade Reading Guarantee and other district assessments. The purpose of these is to ensure these assessments provide proper data related to the reading abilities of students with complex communication need and low incidence disabilities. The document can be found here.

Literacy Assessment SelEction Tool K-6 now available

This document describes the different skills that should be assessed by tier 1 and tier 2 dyslexia screeners and will assist districts and schools with choosing screeners. The document can be found here.

Ohio's Introduction to Dyslexia, Kindergarten-Grade 3 course is available through the learning management system

Questions can be sent to Dyslexia@education.ohio.gov. If you need additional account support after consulting the linked support documents above, please contact OH|ID Profile Help at Profile.Help@education.ohio.gov for OH|ID assistance. If you are in the LMS application and need additional support, please contact LMS Support at LMSSupport@education.ohio.gov.

OHIO'S INTRODUCTION TO DYSLEXIA, Grade 4-12 COURSE IS AVAILABLE THROUGH THE LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Questions can be sent to Dyslexia@education.ohio.gov. If you need additional account support after consulting the linked support documents above, please contact OH|ID Profile Help at Profile.Help@education.ohio.gov for OH|ID assistance. If you are in the LMS application and need additional support, please contact LMS Support at LMSSupport@education.ohio.gov.

Helpful Resources for Districts and Families

Ohio's Dyslexia Guidebook

The Department is pleased to announce Ohio's Dyslexia Guidebook is available. As required by Ohio law, Ohio's Dyslexia Guidebook contains best practices and methods for universal screening, intervention and remediation for children with dyslexia or children displaying dyslexic characteristics and tendencies. Districts and schools should use the guidebook to access critical information for successful implementation of Ohio's dyslexia support laws.

The Department will develop additional resources and guidance to support schools and districts. The FAQ page will be updated as needed.

For questions about Ohio's Dyslexia Guidebook or Ohio's dyslexia support laws, please contact Dyslexia@education.ohio.gov.

Helpful Resources

Federal Funding Guidance: This document contains federal funding guidance for districts and schools to use federal Title funds, IDEA Part B School-aged Special Education funds (ages 3-21) and IDEA Part B Early Childhood Special Education funds (ages 3-5) to implement Ohio's Dyslexia Support laws.

House Bill 436 mandated a cost analysis report to ascertain the potential financial costs incurred by school districts to implement Ohio's dyslexia support laws. The final Cost Study Analysis is now available to download as well as the accompanying Appendix with detailed information.

On January 9, 2021, Governor Mike DeWine signed a set of laws strengthening dyslexia supports for Ohio's children. The new dyslexia support laws establish dyslexia screening measures (ORC 3323.251), professional development for identifying dyslexia and instructing students with dyslexia (ORC 3319.077), a structured literacy certification process for teachers (ORC 3319.078) and the Ohio Dyslexia Committee (ORC 3323.25). The following is a summary of the new set of laws:

Requires the Ohio Department of Education to establish the Ohio Dyslexia Committee consisting of 11 members;

Requires the Ohio Dyslexia Committee to develop a dyslexia guidebook for screening, intervention and remediation for children with dyslexia or displaying dyslexic characteristics and tendencies;

Requires the Ohio Dyslexia Committee to prescribe the number of clock hours of dyslexia-related professional development required for teachers;

Permits the Ohio Dyslexia Committee to make recommendations regarding ratios of students to teachers who have received certification in identifying and addressing dyslexia, the school personnel who should receive the certification and whether professional development requirements should include completing a practicum;

Requires the Department, in collaboration with the Ohio Dyslexia Committee, to identify screening and intervention measures that evaluate the literacy skills of students using a structured literacy program;

Requires school districts and other public schools to administer annual dyslexia screenings beginning in the 2022-2023 school year;

Phases in over three years dyslexia-related professional development requirements for public school teachers;

Requires school districts and other public schools, beginning in the 2022-2023 school year, to establish a structured literacy certification process for teachers.

Frequently Asked Questions

Ohio's Rule for Phonics

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House Bill 33 of the 135th General Assembly included several important updates to Ohio's dyslexia support laws. The following dyslexia professional development requirements apply to teachers in grades K-3 and special education teachers in grades K-12 who are employed by a city, local or exempted village school district, community school or STEM school.

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15 Principles for Reading to Deaf Children - The 15 principles on reading to deaf children was developed from a research on observing how adults read to their deaf/hard of hearing children. It offers strategies to promote literacy and language skills.

Language and Literacy Development in Children Who Are Deaf or Hearing Impaired - An article written by Sandra Briggle, and published in the the Kappa Delta Phi Record, and also on the LD Online website outlines some introductory information.

Language Development Chart - Explore this chart on Language development in English and American Sign Language to be used by educational teams to increase understanding of the language skills of learners who are D/HH. Educational audiologists, speech and language pathologists, ASL teachers and ASL specialists collaborated in developing this chart.

Unlocking the English Code - Explore and connect the areas of phonological awareness, phonics, writing, fluency, vocabulary, communication, language, and comprehension specifically for learners who are D/HH or B/VI. To learn more about this topic, and earn professional development credit, log in to your OCALI ID account by clicking here.

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The Outreach Center for Deafness and Blindness

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Literacy and Deaf / Hard of Hearing | The Outreach Center for Deafness and Blindness

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15 Principles for Reading to Deaf Children - The 15 principles on reading to deaf children was developed from a research on observing how adults read to their deaf/hard of hearing children. It offers strategies to promote literacy and language skills.

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Teaching reading to students who are deaf and hard of hearing

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Teaching reading to students who are deaf and hard of hearing

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Teaching reading to students who are deaf and hard of hearing

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National Institute for Direct Instruction

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Videos & Webinars | National Center on Improving Literacy

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Your source for improving outcomes for students with literacy-related disabilities, including dyslexia.

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Trunk Work: Strong Systems, Structures, and Supports

As a collective state-wide group of education professionals, we are all responsible when it comes to meeting the needs of diverse and complex learners. Integrating supports that represent ALL learners, across all levels of the state-system, is a daunting task. This means we will have to work collaboratively across licensure areas, offices, and other silos of practice to ensure that ALL learners receive the expertise we each individually bring to the field. As a collaborative group, we will need to rely on strong guidelines and processes to planfully connect supports and implement to improve learner outcomes. Some examples of these structures within our system include academic learning standards, the assess, plan, teach cycle - Ohio Improvement Process (OIP), Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS), Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports (PBIS), etc.

Some examples of content targeting this "trunk work" can be found in:

Chapter 2: Designing Rich Tier I Instruction and Assessment: Overview

Chapter 2: Sorting and Clustering Standards for Instruction: Integrated Units

Chapter 4: Language and Communication Access: ALL In!

Chapter 10: Curriculum Screening, Audit, Selection, and Deselection

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Reading Instruction and Supplemental Interventions to Support Equitable Literacy

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Reading Instruction and Supplemental Interventions to Support Equitable Literacy

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The Literacy For All Series

This Keynote session with Sarah Sayko will describe the resources NCIL can provide to schools and parents and the evidence base that supports screening, instruction, and intervention to increase literacy achievement for students who struggle to read and students with dyslexia.

Parents & Families, Schools & Districts

Screening, Instruction, Interventions

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Reading Instruction and Supplemental Interventions to Support Equitable Literacy

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This session will share evidence-based reading practices that can be used in response to screening to address students who show risks for reading difficulties or dyslexia.

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There are many myths about dyslexia. Here you can find many of the most common ones. you can also find these on dr. gaab's twitter (@GaabLab)

Myth #3: First signs of dyslexia or Reading impairments can only be seen after 2-3 years of reading instruction

Myth #8: Dyslexia-friendly fonts help individuals with dyslexia & reading impairments read better

Myth #9: Struggling with learning to read is only affecting your academic outcome, and has no influence on your mental health

Difficulty with reading at grade-level can lead to low self-esteem, feelings of shame, inadequacy

Difficulty with learning to read can lead to helplessness, frustration often leading to a variety of mental health problems and individuals with dyslexia, reading impairments or other learning disabilities show higher rates of depression and anxiety

Individuals with dyslexia/reading impairments are often perceived by others as being 'lazy' or as those who 'do not try enough'. Teachers/parents/peers often misinterpret the 'dyslexic' child's struggle as negative attitude or poor behavior[Saracoglu, 1989; Riddick,1999]

Negative experiences leave children with learning disabilities vulnerable to feelings of shame failure, inadequacy, helplessness, depression & loneliness [e.g.; Valas et al., 1999] which can lead to possible anti-social behavior with long-standing consequences [Baker, 2007].

Without proper remediation, it's less likely that children with learning disabilities such as dyslexia will complete high school [Marder, 1992], join programs of higher education [Quinn, 2001], and increased probability they will enter the juvenile justice system [Wagner, 1993]

Want to read more about the relationship between dyslexia & reading impairments & mental health? Take a look at https://u.org/2AMJRrv by Understood.Org featuring Fumiko Hoeft and also the article in the NY Times, "At Risk in the Culture of 'Normal'"

Myth #10: All individuals with dyslexia share a similar strength & weakness profile

Every person with dyslexia is unique and has their own individual strengths and weaknesses. It's important to provide role models that showcase this variety.

Falsely promoting a certain strength that ALL individuals with dyslexia share (e.g. visual-spatial skills or thinking out of the box) is not empowering and simply incorrect. It can lead to disappointment and more frustration such as "I am not even good at being 'dyslexic'".

Providing role models that are super successful can motivate some children with dyslexia, but others may get even more overwhelmed and experience more pressure to fit a certain mold. Instead, let's point out a variety of role models with dyslexia in the child's own community

Let's find every child's own strength and foster it so they can reach their OWN full potential. Also, not all children with dyslexia have the same profiles! Its a continuum and research points to a multiple deficit model (Pennington, 2006) with variety of risk & protective factors.

Myth #15: All children with Dyslexia have average or above-average IQ OR all children with dyslexia/reading impairments are 'stupid' and have very low IQ

Children who struggle with reading including dyslexia are on a wide IQ spectrum.

There is ample evidence from educational, psychological, and neuroimaging studies showing that a link between IQ and dyslexia or reading impairment is not supported. Most importantly, the evidence suggested that the still-used diagnostic criteria of IQ discrepancy is not warranted.

Tanaka et al. reported that "a number of behavioral studies indicate that underlying phonological deficits are similar in poor readers regardless of discrepant or non-discrepant IQ (O'Malley, 2002 Stanovich, 1994; Stuebing,2002; Tunmer & Greaney, 2010) https://bit.ly/2OPCNlh

Interested in more science between IQ and dyslexia/reading impairment? See https://bit.ly/32jR8KG, https://bit.ly/32kKl3c, https://bit.ly/35HsSEv, https://bit.ly/2Mi3HQX, https://bit.ly/2Bbopvw, https://bit.ly/2oMaf1d, https://bit.ly/35BEmJx

Myth #24: Individuals with dyslexia or reading impairments primarily use their right hemisphere of the brain to process text which makes them interpret written language in a visual-spatial way, like pictures

The idea that some people are left-brain learners, while others are right-brain learners, is a MYTH and tools assessing whether a child primarily processes text with their left/right brain are misleading, false, and should not be used.

This neuromyth most likely originates from an over-generalization of empirical brain research.

Research has shown that language and reading are predominately processed in the left-hemisphere, but right-hemispheric regions are also involved and important.

The fact that empirical findings have been misunderstood/simplified make it hard to dispel them

Many studies have shown structural and functional brain differences between people with dyslexia/reading impairments and their peers.

Myth #25: If you are a 2nd language learner, you cannot be diagnosed with dyslexia/reading impairment in that language until you are proficient

Myth #27: Early screening for dyslexia/reading impairments gives students a diagnosis at age 5 before they can read

The purpose of early screenings is not to diagnose, but to identify children AT RISK for developing a reading impairment.

Dr. Gaab explains this in this article written for the BOLD blog: https://bit.ly/349VNzp :

"An analogy from medicine may be helpful in this context: Adults are advised to undergo screening for high cholesterol levels, which can indicate an increased risk of developing heart disease. Those diagnosed with high cholesterol don't automatically receive a diagnosis of heart disease. They are provided with an evidence-based "response to screening," generally a combination of prescribed exercise, dietary changes, and/or medication. This may prevent the development of the disease, or at least lessen its severity. The goal is to reduce the prevalence of heart disease, by encouraging people to take preventive action and to improve outcomes of those who will develop it by implementing lifestyle changes earlier, prior to a diagnosis."

In the case of reading impairments, we need to make a similar shift from a deficit-driven to a prevention model. With the help of high-quality screening programs, we can identify AT-RISK children early, but refrain from diagnosing them while they are still in preschool/K.

Myth #29: Children with an older sibling or parent with dyslexia will always develop dyslexia themselves

Research has suggested that approximately 40-60% of people with a first degree relative with dyslexia will struggle with reading themselves.

Several genes have been reported to be candidates for dyslexia susceptibility and it has been suggested that the majority of these genes plays a role in early brain development. [e.g.; Galaburda et al., 2006; Hannula-Jouppi et al., 2005; Meng et al., 2005; Skiba et al., 2011]

Please read the work of these wonderful genetic researchers here: Bruce Pennington at the University of Delaware, Elena Grigorenko Haskins Laboratories, Anthony Monaco at Tufts University Sara Hart, Florina Erbeli, and Dr. Elsje van Bergen, and many more

Here is one helpful summary for a lay-audience https://bit.ly/2BUgoLV by Dorothy Bishop

Myth #31: Dyslexia/reading impairment is rare

While the exact prevalence of dyslexia/reading impairments depends on many factors (e.g., the definition, the language, diagnostic practices), we can say with great certainty that dyslexia/reading impairments are not rare.

Let's take a look at the numbers: The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) released a new report showing that 65% of 4th graders are not reading proficiently.

We know that the estimates of dyslexia range from 3-12% but vary across countries and prevalence rates for dyslexia are difficult to estimate due to differences in the definitions used, how and at what ages individuals are identified, criteria for diagnosis, and orthographic transparency (the degree of consistency between spelling and sound) plays a role as well!

Current estimates in English-speaking countries typically range between 5-10%, with greater variance in US than UK estimates. Estimates as high as 10% of individuals in some Chinese societies, about 7% of individuals in Japan when examining reading of Kanji

In addition to 5-10% in English/Asian countries, prevalence estimates are about 5% in Germany, 3-4% in Italy and Spain.

Most importantly, all of these individuals benefit from early identification & evidence-based interventions regardless of the cause of their reading problems

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There are many myths about dyslexia. Here you can find many of the most common ones. you can also find these on dr. gaab’s twitter (@GaabLab)

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Comprehension is the understanding and interpretation of what is read. To be able to accurately understand written material, children need to be able to (1) decode what they read; (2) make connections between what they read and what they already know; and (3) think deeply about what they have read.

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If you prefer, read the text version of the infographic.

Route to Reading: Form a Pit Crew

Addressing needs together promotes faster development and catches trouble spots early. Find a solution that you and the school can both support.

Questions to ask your child's school

How is my child's language and literacy learning being supported in this system of literacy services and support?

What types of support are offered to my child if he or she is struggling to read or write?

What accommodations does the school provide to help my child read or write?

What might happen next with instruction and support if my child continues to struggle?

Abstract

Addressing needs together promotes faster development and catches trouble spots early. Find a solution that you and the school can both support.

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If you prefer, read the text version of the infographic. Route to Reading: Form a Pit Crew Addressing needs together promotes faster development and catches trouble spots early. Find a solution that you and the school can both support.

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Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation - even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It's an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn't true and are now reckoning with the consequences - children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.

Sixty years ago, Marie Clay developed a way to teach reading she said would help kids who were falling behind. They'd catch up and never need help again. Today, her program remains popular and her theory about how people read is at the root of a lot of reading instruction in schools. But Marie Clay was wrong.
Sold a Story is an independent investigative journalism project from American Public Media. We rely on your donations to support this kind of rigorous reporting.
The controversial educational publishing company has sold instructional materials and professional resources in almost every state, earning at least $1.6 billion over a decade. Explore a map of school districts.

More states are now requiring districts to adopt curriculum that adheres to the science of reading. Look up the policy in your state.

At least 15 states have passed laws about how schools teach reading since the Sold a Story podcast was released in 2022, but there is pushback.

Here's a reading list put together by Emily Hanford.

This discussion guide, created by a teacher, invites educators, parents, community members and kids to have a conversation about the podcast.

Emails and voice messages poured in from people who listened to Sold a Story.

We'll let you know when we release new episodes of the podcast. Enter your address below.

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Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

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There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation - even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read.

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Learning About Your Child's Reading Development

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Learning About Your Child's Reading Development

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This toolkit helps parents and families understand the many different skills involved with teaching your child to learn to read and how to support your child's reading development at school and home.

You will learn:

How to tell if your child is getting high-quality reading instruction at school.

Questions to ask about the reading program in your child's school.

How to tell if your child has reading difficulties and how you can help.

This toolkit includes:

An Online Tutorial

Research Briefs & Infographics

Tools & Resources

A Facilitator's Guide

Supporting Materials

Download and print these infographics with ideas and questions to ask your child's school linked to the tutorial.

Facilitator's Guide

The purpose of the facilitator guide is to provide information and materials to effectively facilitate the Learning about Your Child's Reading Development at Home Tutorial in-person as a workshop series and enable participants to achieve the learning objectives.

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Learning About Your Child's Reading Development

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This toolkit helps parents and families understand the many different skills involved with teaching your child to learn to read and how to support your child's reading development at school and home.

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Questions and Answers: What resource would you share with families and why?

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Video for Parents

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Teacher Professional Learning | Literacy, Math | MTSS

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As a young child, Keyon Anderson knew that his brain didn't work like other people's. His peers were learning to read and he wasn't. His teachers told him to try harder. His mother was told he would grow out of his reading difficulties. Keyon was diagnosed with a processing disorder and held back in the second grade, but he continued to struggle. When he reached high school he was reading at a second grade level. He wanted to be successful but didn't have the skills. It wasn't until 9th grade that he finally received effective intervention for dyslexia. A dedicated teacher worked with Keyon to teach him the fundamentals of reading and ways to learn that worked for him. By the end of his freshman year, Keyon was transformed from a failing student to one with a 4.0 GPA and a fierce desire to learn.

Keyon graduated from high school and went on to earn a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, and a Doctor of Education in Educational Leadership at the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education. Today, Dr. Keyon Anderson is an author, motivational speaker, and advocate for underserved children and families in his Long Beach, California community.

Linda Diamond, former president of CORE and author of the Teaching Reading Sourcebook, sat down with Dr. Anderson to learn more about his journey. In this 20-minute podcast, Dr. Anderson provides an intimate look at what it's like for a child struggling to read and offers advice for students and parents about how to advocate for the help they need.
Listen now:
https://www.corelearn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/keyon-anderson-final.mp3

Learn more about Dr. Anderson and his work on his website. Also be sure to visit CORE's Dyslexia Virtual Library for more information and resources - including free, on-demand webinars, articles, and whitepapers - about word reading difficulties and best practices for early identification and evidence-based reading interventions.

Podcast Transcript

Linda Diamond:

Thanks for tuning in to this continuing conversation we've been having at CORE around reading as it connects to social justice. I'm Linda Diamond, president and founder of CORE and the author of the Teaching Reading Sourcebook.

Linda Diamond:

Dyslexia is one of the most common word-reading difficulties and has been estimated to affect as many as 15% to 20% of the population. Based on that, you might think that children are quickly identified and receive support right away. Unfortunately, that's far from true. Too often these children are left on their own and don't get the support they need, particularly children of color and students living in poverty. They may struggle for years and suffer long-term academic and social-emotional consequences.

Linda Diamond:

I'm joined today by Dr. Keyon Anderson, who was one of those children who was not identified in early childhood. In preschool, his mother noticed that something wasn't quite working, but was told by professionals that he would grow out of it. That, often, is the answer that parents are given. It was not until he was around seven or eight that he was diagnosed with a processing disorder and then went on for three years without special assistance and was held back in a grade.

Linda Diamond:

In fact, Keyon was a freshman in high school reading at about second-grade level before he was given the help he needed. When he entered high school, he didn't think he would graduate, but he did. Not only did Keyon graduate from high school, he earned a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, and ultimately a Doctor of Education in educational leadership at the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education.

Linda Diamond:

Today, Dr. Anderson works to help Long Beach's underserved population, including first-generation, low-income, and ethnic minority students. He's a prolific writer, as evidenced by a large number of books... I think it's about 13, at least... that he's authored. He's a motivational speaker and an active member of the community. It's really my privilege to introduce Keyon, and I will stop there and welcome him, and he'll get deeper into his story. Hi, Dr. Anderson.

Keyon Anderson:

Hello, Linda, and hello, everybody listening.

Linda Diamond:

I know I've already said a lot about you, but why don't you tell us about yourself in your own words, and when you first understood that you were having difficulty in school, and that struggling to learn to read and to learn was impacting you?

Keyon Anderson:

It's interesting, because in preparation for this interview, I had to take a stroll down memory lane. And I remember being a very small kid and feeling like something was off and even expressing to my mom, "I'm not that smart. The other kids, we're in class and they get this stuff, and I just don't." I would also stay up many late nights and I would watch the paid programming, and they had all of these tool kits that one could purchase that sort of help kids learn how to read. So, like Hooked on Phonics or sight word sorts of tools that I didn't have at home, but I was just always truly frustrated. Like, "This kid is, like, two years old, and apparently they can read, and they're able to operate in ways that I'm not."

Keyon Anderson:

So, very early on, I had this residing hopelessness in terms of my ability to achieve in an academic setting. I think something that made me even more frustrated was some of the messaging that I received from some of my teachers in regards to me not doing better out of this sort of notion that I was actively deciding that I didn't want to learn. It was sort of like, "Well, if you just tried harder, you would be better at this." And it was like, "I'm really trying, and I really want to be successful, but I don't know what the missing piece is." And that was something that I struggled with for years, being able to vocalize, "This is sort of what I'm experiencing." I had a lot of people around who told me what it looked like as a result of how I was performing, but I didn't have the word. So, I knew early on there was something different. I didn't quite understand it.

Keyon Anderson:

And for me, the first time that I really had someone who sat down and talked to me about it, I was in the ninth grade, in high school. My special education teacher, Miss O., she actually sat me down and she's like, "Look, some of the stuff that worked for other kids just isn't going to work for you, and that's fine, but I'm going to show you how to learn in ways that work for your brain." And it was like night and day within a nine-month period in terms of how I was able to access my education. I remember barely making it out of middle school. I think I had a couple Ds, and I probably was only pushed forward because I had an IEP, and then I made it to ninth grade and I had someone who slowed down and helped me make sense of it. So, that was the first time that I really understood, "Okay. So, my brain is operating in some other way, and I can relinquish the obligation that I have in my mind about doing things like other students. I need to do it in the way that works for me, and that is okay."

Linda Diamond:

Wow. That's a long time to wait to find that out. And thank goodness for Miss. O. And I think that's the reality for many kids, that there's someone, finally, who gets it and then is able to really assist those kids. And can you describe a little bit about what she did? What was done that really did help you to start to learn?

Keyon Anderson:

So, when I was working with Miss O., she utilized a program called the Lindamood-Bell program. I think I'm pronouncing that correctly. And what that meant was she took me back to the basics. So, I was in the ninth grade, going over, "These are the sounds that are associated with the letters. This is what it looks like when you put these sounds together to make words. This is how you break up the word. This is 1000 sight words that absolutely don't make any sense, but this is English, and it's complicated. So, you also need to learn these words so that it makes sense." She really helped me begin to differentiate in terms of breaking down and understanding words. And then she also utilized text that was closely related to things that I could relate to. So, while I was in high school, we were reading the Bloopers series, and I read The Child Called It, and I read other books that sort of related to things that I could connect to based on what I was seeing in my world.

Linda Diamond:

Oh, that makes sense. That's interesting that it was the Lindamood-Bell system. That was really literally one of the very first early systems that taught phonology and systematic phonics and the linguistics. In fact, I was a principal in an elementary school, and all of our kindergarten teachers used it to teach kindergarten to all the kids. So, that prevented kids from developing problems or going too long. Given how long it took for you, how did you keep yourself motivated?

Keyon Anderson:

Before the ninth grade, I wasn't. So, before high school, I went to school as a mandate. I understood that going to school was sort of a responsibility that I had, and if I was not attending school, then that meant that my mom would get this ticket and we'd have to go to court. And that was just way too much of a battle to fight. So, before high school, I wasn't motivated in terms of academics. I had other interests. I danced. I was involved in a few activities in relation to my mom's business, but school was sort of like my last resort. And then in ninth grade, after meeting Miss O. and learning the basics, it literally transformed what I thought was possible. And then at that point, it was like, "Okay. I'm doing so much better." I went from almost flunking out of middle school to having my first 4.0. And I was like, "Wait. I've got all As," and the bulk of my classes were regular main classes or general ed classes, with the exception of my reading development class.

Keyon Anderson:

So, I'm competing with my peers and I'm actually doing this. For me, that was exciting, because I'd always wanted to be successful. I just didn't have the skills to be successful. So, then, after getting that, it was like I was on fire. My freshman year, I was in general ed, with the exception of my reading class. My sophomore year, I began to take AP and honor classes. By the end of my sophomore year, I was taking community college classes. So, it really sort of set the stage that other things that I wanted to be attainable were now attainable. I remember looking back and really being excited, in middle school, about taking wood class or taking home economics. And I didn't get to take those classes because I had my reading development class. So, in the ninth grade, it was like, "I do really well. I now can take electives, which means that I can get some exposure to other things that I'm going to enjoy."

Linda Diamond:

Wow. So, things really transformed for you in high school.

Keyon Anderson:

Yeah.

Linda Diamond:

How did that look? How did your mother look at that? Given that she, early on, was aware that something was different, but now she saw you kind of on fire in high school. What was the impact on her?

Keyon Anderson:

I think for my mom, I think she felt vindicated. She was like, "I told these people, and I've been telling them for a long time, and no one is listening to me." So, I think that for my mom, she knew that I could do it. She just didn't know what it was going to take in order for me to turn around and be able to do it. So, in her mind, she's like, "Something's off. He's missing something here." And she didn't have the skills herself to be able to help me navigate that process, but she was very active in advocating for me all the way throughout, and when I hit my freshman year and I was doing well, she was like, "Finally, someone is listening to what I've been saying all of these years."

Linda Diamond:

Wow. Yeah. That's so amazing. And then after you've completed all these degrees, you became an author. And what led you to being an author and wanting to be a writer?

Keyon Anderson:

So, interestingly enough, while still in Miss O.'s class, because I was doing well, I actually began this process of saving all of my work, because I was impressed. Like, "Oh my God. I wrote this thing. One day, this would be a really cool story." And then, when I got into my second year of my doctorate program, I was like, "I'm going to finish this book I've been drafting for 10 years." So, then I finally finished my first novel, which is more for teenagers, called Moments Either Define or Contribute to Who You Are, and I utilized a lot of the beginning framing that I had developed while I was in high school. So, I'd saved little stories and essays and things that I wrote for classes, and I embedded those things into my first novel. And then from there, I was really looking to create stories for people who look like me and stories that I would have appreciated during my journey.

Keyon Anderson:

So, one of the books that I recently published is called Prosper, and it's actually going through the process of this kid who wants to learn how to read and is having struggles and then has a teacher who's patient enough to walk him through the process and explain, "This is what's happening in your brain." And in my mind, I figure if we could start that conversation earlier, then they can know that they're not alone, because for years I was isolated in my mind. The things that I'm trying to manifest and trying to produce for the world, they just weren't coming out, and I was holding myself to standards that were unrealistic for the way that my brain operates. In school, they were like, "You want to use Cornell Notes," where you're writing questions on one side and the notes in the center. And I'm like, "This is way too much processing. I'm actually confused, and it's not serving for me," and to be affirmed and sort of... That really made a difference, and I really wanted to be able to write and produce things for kids so that they could have that moment that I had when I was reading the Bloopers series.

Linda Diamond:

I'm curious. Do you have a favorite book among the books that you wrote?

Keyon Anderson:

So, I don't know if I have a favorite book. I think they all represent different things. I think that the book that made me cry was probably Prosper. Being able to see a story like mine on paper and being able to encourage other educators, like, "You could slow down and you can see this." In my work and being in school settings, I've been in a space with a kid for 20 minutes. I'm like, "So, this is probably what's going on. He's not a bad kid." And it almost makes me wonder, maybe I can identify more and quickly because I also relate, but then I'm also wondering if people are not paying attention, because it's like, the signs are there. How many times are they going to write an S backwards before you realize that that's not a three, and that there's something off? So, I think for me, that was a big hurdle, especially because I'm a professor now and I'm a writer. And I think that that book really speaks to that journey, and for me, it speaks to the responsibility that we have as educators in order to make sure that we're paying attention.

Linda Diamond:

Yeah. And that leads into my last question quite nicely, and that is, what advice would you give other students, other children, but also educators?

Keyon Anderson:

So, the advice that I would give other children... And the book that I wrote centered around this, They Say We Don't, there's sort of this framing and this narrative that we build about what our limitations are. So, I wrote up book sort of centered around, "You can jump out of a plane. You can scuba dive. You can travel the world, and you can accomplish great things," sort of building that out, and I think reinforcing that as possible and that they have to find their groove and what works for them. Even today, like in my doctoral program, my professors was like, "You need to take notes." If I'm taking notes, I'm not listening, because as soon as this pencil hits the paper, you no longer have my attention. So, I know that it makes you feel uncomfortable that I am not taking notes in the traditional format, but that method just doesn't work for me. So, I think teaching young kids that it's okay to be different in ways that contribute to your success. My message for teachers is not to try to fit a square peg into a round hole. Everything isn't going to be the same, and I think that we have to look at practices that allow for differences and that allow for students to show up in ways that make sense for them, and I also think that we have to be patient in that process.

Keyon Anderson:

It took me till I was 14 before it finally clicked. That was after repeating the second grade. That was after having some form of interventions. I don't know. I would say that I didn't think they were intervention. Those packages with tasks to complete on your own about filling in the word with the sentence, but I lacked the skills to do that. So, those things didn't make sense. But being patient while on this process, and then I think with parents, recognizing the power that you have to advocate.

Keyon Anderson:

I've spent a significant amount of time working one-on-one with parents and teaching them how to advocate for their child even when they feel disempowered. So, getting additional services and doing these additional things, it's inconvenient. You may have to take off of work. You may have to take meetings that are inconvenient, but if we can get this done early, it can set the stage for unlimited possibilities. My mom not going into work to go to an IEP or having a conference with a teacher, those things made it possible for me to get here. And unfortunately, because I was one of maybe 25 to 35 students in a class, the teacher may not have had the capacity to slow down enough. So, it really mattered that my parent, my mother, was advocating for me along this process. And she was also teaching me how to advocate for myself. So, you have to speak up. You have to say what you need in working through that process.

Linda Diamond:

Wow. Thank you. Thank you so much. This is so inspirational. It's certainly what the work that we do at CORE, where we work with teachers to actually help them understand first how reading works and what to notice early on and what to do about it. And your messages are so important. And I'm certain that your books are contributing to those messages. And thank you for working not only with kids and students, but also talking to parents who really do have to be an advocate for their children, even if they're in the face of a denial from the system sometimes, which is difficult.

Linda Diamond:

So, I'd like to thank you again and wish you well as you continue this journey. I actually ordered Prosper. So, I'm excited. It hasn't come yet. So, I'm really excited to get it and read it. And thank you so much.

Keyon Anderson:

Thank you, Linda.

About CORE

From Cat in the Hat to reading a prescription label, from fractions to following a recipe, from writing an essay to writing a resume, what students learn in school impacts what they can achieve in life. At CORE, we believe that all students can become strong readers and master math. All it takes is teachers who have a deep knowledge of evidence-based instructional practices and ongoing support to implement them in their classrooms.

CORE partners with schools and districts to help educators implement high-quality math and English language arts curriculum, rigorous instruction, and effective assessment practices. By supporting teachers in their professional growth, we are ensuring that generations of young people learn to read, write, and do math so that all students, especially those who have been marginalized and traditionally underserved, can reach their full potential. Join us in our mission to help every teacher provide an outstanding education for each and every student. Learn more about CORE and our workshops, courses, and consulting services at corelearn.com.

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Living and Succeeding with Dyslexia: A Conversation with Dr. Keyon Anderson - Teacher Professional Learning | Literacy, Math | MTSS

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As a young child, Keyon Anderson knew that his brain didn't work like other people's. His peers were learning to read and he wasn't. His teachers told him to try harder. His mother was told he would grow out of his reading difficulties. Keyon was diagnosed with a processing disorder and held back in the [...]

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The core purpose of The Dyslexia Initiative is to support families, and their dyslexic children

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International Dyslexia Association Fact Sheets

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International Dyslexia Association Fact Sheets

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IDA fact sheets are convenient, professionally reviewed materials designed to improve understanding and support advocacy initiatives. Fact sheets are frequently used to enrich and supplement IEP meetings, school board discussions, and district policy initiatives. Click on topics of interest below to view and download fact sheets.

To access new fact sheets and other free resources from IDA, please visit the Dyslexia Digital Library at www.DyslexiaLibrary.org

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Fact Sheets - International Dyslexia Association

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IDA fact sheets are convenient, professionally reviewed materials designed to improve understanding and support advocacy initiatives. Fact sheets are

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When Education Promises are too Good to Be True

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When Education Promises are too Good to Be True

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Reading SOS: Expert Answers to Family Questions About Reading

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Writing SOS To learn from the experts on how to help your child with writing see our Q&A video series Writing SOS. Our Reading SOS experts answer your questions about the sounds of speech (phonemic awareness), phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, reading and motivation.

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Questions to Ask

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This website was developed to help Ohio's families learn more about reading.

Visit the website often to see new fun and engaging activities. These activities will be archived in one of the tabs at the top of website. You can also search the website using the Search feature to find information of interest to you.

We hope you'll find helpful tips and activities to encourage your child to become a successful reader. We also have reading research and resources for those who would like more detailed information.

Reading Tips for Families Accessibility features

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This website was developed to help Ohio's families learn more about reading. Visit the website often to see new fun and engaging activities. These activities will be archived in one of the tabs at the top of website. You can also search the website using the Search feature to find information of interest to you.

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[Editorial Note: This infographic has been updated. Please to access the current version on Nancy Young's website.}

By Georgette Dickman

Nancy Young, a member of IDA, holds a Master's of Education in Special Education with a focus on dyslexia. She has extensive experience and knowledge in teaching evidence-based approaches in reading, spelling, and writing to parents, teachers, and students. In schools across Canada, Young provides professional development that includes coaching, assessment, IEP planning, and reading/writing program development and evaluation. She is the author of Secret Code Actions, a book that offers the instructional basics most children need to learn the code using creative movement as an integral part of instruction.

The concept of The Ladder of Reading emerged during Young's lectures with teachers and parents who believed the myth that Structured Literacy was only beneficial and necessary for struggling readers. To counter that misunderstanding, she created an infographic featuring the categories and percentages that illustrated the ratio of individuals who require an explicit, sequential, systematic, phonics-based approach to learning to read, compared to the small proportion of individuals who learn to read effortlessly. With a few well-chosen words, the Ladder conveys the point, frequently unknown, that a Structured Literacy approach to beginning reading is advantageous for most students.

Infographics are visual presentations with minimal text to explain complex information. Under Young's direction, Dean Stanton's artwork features three smiling children in various stages of learning to read. To show that learning to read should be exciting and fun, the children are waving and happy. The Ladder of Reading is the mechanism that provides support as the students build their reading skills. At the top of the Ladder, the little bird symbolizes independence and indicates that skilled reading has been achieved. At this point, with basic skills mastered, the students fly away and comprehend on their own. Finally, The Ladder of Reading chart is color-coded from red (risk area) that demands a Structured Literacy approach to green (safety area) that is advantaged by a Structured Literacy approach.

It is clear that Nancy Young's infographic has hit its mark!
For more on the statistics underpinning Nancy Young's infographic, please click here: The Ladder of Reading Statistics. For a gallery of other IDA and third-party infographics, please visit our Infographics page. Do you have an infographic you would like to be considered for publication in IDA's Infographics gallery? Send inquiries with links/.jpgs to communications@dyslexia.org. Copyright © 2018 International Dyslexia Association (IDA). Opinions expressed in The Examiner and/or via links do not necessarily reflect those of IDA. We encourage sharing of Examiner articles. If portions are cited, please make appropriate reference. Articles may not be reprinted for the purpose of resale. Permission to republish this article is available from info@dyslexiaida.org.

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Ladder of Reading & Writing© Infographic - International Dyslexia Association

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Nancy Young, a member of IDA, holds a Master's of Education in Special Education with a focus on dyslexia. She has extensive experience and knowledge in

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If you prefer, read the text version of the infographic or watch the video that takes a closer look at how to spot questionable or ineffective practices.

Avoid a Lemon: Looking Under the Hood

Supporting Resources

Sound-Spelling Chart

Make-a-Word activity from FCRR

Route to Reading For Families: Avoid a Lemon

You and the school can share literacy resources to help your child and others get evidence-based literacy instruction. Learn to spot questionable or ineffective practices.

Decoding Words

What is it?

The ability to figure out unknown words correctly.

If you are given:

Strategies that encourage your child to look away from letters to read words (looking at the pictures, using context clues, saying the first sound and guessing).

Ask for:

Ways to help your child use knowledge of letter-sound relationships* to read words.

Why?

Kids who can't decode often don't become strong readers. Reading words correctly require knowing how letters and groups of letters link to sounds to form letter-sound relationships.

Learning Sight Words (like high-frequency words)

What is it?

The ability to know a word instantly and easily, including ones spelled regularly or irregularly.

If you are given:

Strategies, tips, or activities focusing your child on memorizing whole words to learn sight words.

Ask for:

Strategies, tips, or activities focusing your child on saying and using letter-sound relationships* and letter order to learn sight words (irregular word parts and advanced letter-sound relationships are taught to be remembered).

Why?

Sight word learning is not based on visual memory. It requires knowing speech sounds, letter-sound relationships, and letter order. There are too many
words to learn by memory alone.

Spelling Words

What is it?

The ability to write words correctly.

If you are given:

Strategies, tips, or activities focusing your child on memorizing letters or letter shapes to spell words (word searches, tracing words, rainbow writing).

Ask for:

Strategies, tips, or activities focusing your child on saying and using letter-sound relationships* and the right letter order to spell words.

Why?

Spelling is not based on visual memory. It requires knowing speech sounds, letter-sound relationships, and letter order.

*Based on skills appropriate for your child's grade-level and literacy needs

Suggested Citation

National Center on Improving Literacy (2019). Route to Reading: Avoid a Lemon. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, Office of Special Education Programs, National Center on Improving Literacy. Retrieved from http://improvingliteracy.org.

Abstract

You and the school can share literacy resources to help your child and others get evidence-based literacy instruction. Learn to spot questionable or ineffective practices.

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If you prefer, read the text version of the infographic or watch the video that takes a closer look at how to spot questionable or ineffective practices. Avoid a Lemon: Looking Under the Hood Supporting Resources Sound-Spelling Chart Make-a-Word activity from FCRR Route to Reading For Families: Avoid a Lemon You and the school can share literacy resources to help your child and others get evidence-based literacy instruction.

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Podcast # 3 - Many kids struggle with reading – and children of color are far less likely to get the help they need

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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.

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

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

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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.

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Podcast #2 - How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers

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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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Podcast #1 - Why aren't kids being taught to read?

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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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Family Resources

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Public libraries are a great resource for your child's literacy learning. They often provide free literacy events, in addition to children's audio and print books. Library staff can help find resources to support your child's learning at home.

Check your local library to see what it offers!

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Our Dyslexic Children - 2020 - Full Film

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The Ohio Statewide Family Engagement Center

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Ohio's Statewide Family Engagement Center

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Every Child. Every Family. Every School. Everyone has a role in launching students to success! We give you the resources to lead the launch. Search hundreds of resources by topic or audience below. Resources For Educators Explore Resources ForFamilies Explore Resources For Community Partners Explore…

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Research Matters / The Power of Parental Expectations

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Research Matters / The Power of Parental Expectations

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Vol. 75

No. 1

Abstract

Parent Involvement Matters ...

... But Not Necessarily How We Expect

Distilling the "Magic" of Parent Support

Doing Unto Parents ...

Parent involvement starts-and ends-with powerful everyday messages.

Abstract

Parent Involvement Matters ...

... But Not Necessarily How We Expect

Distilling the "Magic" of Parent Support

Doing Unto Parents ...

In A Hope in the Unseen, Ron Suskind (1998) recounts how Barbara Jennings, a single mother barely making ends meet in inner-city Washington, D.C., spent precious dollars from her paycheck on a sweatshirt for her adolescent son, Cedric. No ordinary shirt, it was emblazoned with the word HARVARD. Jennings intended it to serve as a powerful expression of her hopes for Cedric. This subtle, everyday reminder of her aspirations for him captures the essence of what research tells us about how parents influence their children's academic outcomes, and points to why many schools' parent involvement efforts may miss the mark.

Parent Involvement Matters ...

Let's start by stating the obvious: Parent involvement matters-a lot. In a synthesis of factors influencing student achievement, Marzano (2000) concluded that fully 33 percent of the variance in student achievement could be predicted by factors related to students' home environment -far more than the influence of school quality (7 percent) or teacher quality (13 percent). So, in many respects, schools are right to focus on (or at least not ignore) the influence of family involvement.

... But Not Necessarily How We Expect

Yet the kinds of parent behaviors that most influence students' achievement aren't always what we might expect-or the behaviors we seek to elicit through school-based parent involvement efforts. William Jeynes, who conducted multiple meta-analyses of studies on both parent influences on student achievement and the efficacy of school-based parent involvement programs, concluded that theorists and educators alike may have overlooked "the most powerful aspects of parental involvement," which "are frequently subtle" (2011, p. 10), while fixating on more obvious, yet less consequential, parental drivers of student success. Consider these findings:

Parental communication of high expectations is key. A meta-analysis of 31 studies (Fan & Chen, 2001) found that the extent to which parents regularly communicate high academic aspirations for their children had a greater effect size (.87) than any other parental behavior, including how strictly they supervise their children's free time or monitor their homework, which had an effect size of 18. Similarly, Jeynes's 2007 meta-analysis of 52 studies arrived at a similar conclusion: Parental expectations had nearly twice the effect on students' achievement that parenting style (like providing a supportive home environment with adequate discipline) did.

Bird-dogging homework gets the job done, but doesn't improve achievement. A synthesis of 14 studies examining the impact of school programs to encourage parents to set rules, monitor homework, and ensure homework completion (Patall, Cooper, & Robinson, 2008) found these efforts helped students get their work done, but had no effect on achievement. Moreover-no newsflash for most parents-the more parents harangued children about homework, the less kids wanted to do it.

Parents and students communicating about school has little impact on student success. Although we might like to think that the tell-us-what-you-learned-at-school dinner conversations encourage student success, research (e.g., Jeynes, 2007) has found few discernible effects of such parent-student communication on student achievement.

Parent involvement in school activities doesn't translate into higher achievement. Jeynes (2007) also found that parents' attendance at school activities had no effect on achievement (although it boosted student grades and teachers' perceptions of students).

Distilling the "Magic" of Parent Support

So, on one hand, it appears that many activities schools encourage in the name of parent involvement-like asking parents to sign-off on homework and attend school activities-have little or no impact on student success. On the other hand, school-based parent involvement programs may be giving short shrift to the one thing matters most-parents communicating high expectations to their children. Does that mean educators ought to throw up their hands and simply ignore much of what predicts student success? Should we tell parents to stop checking grades, monitoring homework, or attending back-to-school night?

Not necessarily. We might reconsider, however, what's really happening in home environments that support student success. Perhaps students in such homes aren't being forced into compliance-oriented behaviors like doing homework, but rather, developing an internal desire to work hard, persist, and succeed academically. It's worth noting that a McREL meta-analysis of instructional strategies (Beesley & Apthorp, 2010) found that the amount of time students spend on homework has a relatively weak effect size (.13) compared with the more reflective, intrinsically motivated activity of practicing or rehearsing key skills (.42).

Moreover, as Jeynes (2011) concluded from his meta-analyses of research on parent involvement, the parenting style most correlated with student success combines love and support with structure and discipline. In other words, parental expectations for learning aren't delivered as thou-shalt-go-to-college edicts, but rather, as everyday enforcements of the value of education, sacrifice, and hard work that students come to internalize as high aspirations for themselves.

Doing Unto Parents ...

How can we support parents in helping children internalize high aspirations for themselves? We might start by treating parents with kindness and respect, which, Jeynes observes, "may be more important than the specific guidelines and tutelage [schools] offer to parents" (2011, p. 10-11).

Respectful communication helps show that school overtures to engage parents come from a point of mutual concern about students, not from an attempt to get parents to comply with the school's wishes. Jeynes encourages educators to create a "customer-friendly" environment, inviting open communication with parents and visiting them in their homes to show that teachers have high hopes for, and commitment to, students. Ultimately, respecting parents and sharing our high aspirations for their children can model the subtle, yet powerful messages we know help students succeed-akin to the everyday reminder of a collegiate sweatshirt proclaiming our highest hopes for their future.

References

Beesley, A. D., & Apthorp, H. S. (2010). Classroom instruction that works, second edition: Research report. Denver, CO: Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning.

Fan, X., & Chen, M. (2001). Parental involvement and students' academic achievement: A meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 13(1), 1-22.

Jeynes, W. H. (2007). The relationship between parental involvement and urban secondary student achievement: A meta-analysis. Urban Education, 42(1), 82-110.

Jeynes, W. H. (2011). Parental involvement research: Moving to the next level. The School Community Journal, 21(1), 9-18.

Marzano, R. J. (2000). A new era of school reform: Going where the research takes us. Aurora, CO: Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning.

Patall, E., Cooper, H., & Robinson, J. C. (2008). Parent involvement in homework: A research synthesis. Review of Educational Research, 78(4), 1039-1101.

Suskind, R. (1998). A hope in the unseen: An American odyssey from the inner city to the Ivy League. New York: Broadway Books.

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Research Matters / The Power of Parental Expectations

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Vol. 75 No. 1 Abstract Parent Involvement Matters ... ... But Not Necessarily How We Expect Distilling the "Magic" of Parent Support Doing Unto Parents ... Parent involvement starts-and ends-with powerful everyday messages. Abstract Parent Involvement Matters ... ... But Not Necessarily How We Expect Distilling the "Magic" of Parent Support Doing Unto Parents ...