The Reading Lie

A while back, I was catching up with a good friend and colleague, Dr. Robbie Crawford, who specializes in early childhood education. Dr. Rob, as she is called by friends, has been working on a book about how children learn and best practices in teaching them and helping them to grow and thrive.

I told her about my dissertation research topic (the motivations of parents who withdrew their children from public school in order to homeschool them from the onset of the pandemic to the present) and shared with her some of the most surprising and impactful findings of the literature review I did.

She was enthusiastic and supportive, as always, and asked me if I had ever listened to the podcast, Sold A Story. (I had not.) The podcast, she explained, was all about how parents became aware and alarmed that their children couldn’t read during the pandemic, and went through reporter Emily Hanford’s research on why it was happening. I jotted down the podcast title, and later, during a long drive started listening to it.

It was riveting. I was shocked and incredulous, and eventually felt not a small amount of guilt and shame. I’ll explain that part later.

The storyline (see what I did there?) of the podcast is that back in the 60s and 70s there was a movement that started in New Zealand with the research and anecdotal experience of a woman named Marie Clay (pronounced MAR-ee, not Muh-REE.) She developed a system originally meant to be used by teachers whose students struggled with phonics and other reading instruction. The system used cueing, whereby children looked at pictures, used context, and sentence structure to try to guess words they didn’t know. The last option was to try to sound out the word.

I’ll let you discover the Sold A Story podcast yourself, because Emily Hanford explains her investigation WAY better than I ever could.

But the punchline is that this system eventually evolved into a reading instruction method that Clay and her followers felt could be used for all students learning to read (not just struggling students). Publishers in the US printed curricula based on that system and teachers around our country used it to replaced phonics and science-based reading strategies rooted in decoding — long after the cueing system had been tested by neuroscientists and found not only ineffective, but potentially harmful for students who were learning to read.

At their height, more than two thirds of our nation’s schools were using materials by either Lucy Caulkins or (Irene)Fountas & (Gay Sue) Pinnell, the two largest teams of creators of resources based on Clay’s ideas, and a third of those schools were doing so under local or state mandates. That’s almost 50,000 schools nationwide using reading instruction in the classrooms that had been proven not to work.

My guilt and shame comes because, right after the pandemic, I re-entered the classroom. My experience was in high school, but the need at the time was in elementary, so I agreed to teach 3rd and 4th grade. I remember being shocked and appalled that the majority of students were not strong readers, and I saw how it affected every single subject and activity.

But I was teaching a new grade level and trying to get my sea legs with "littles”, as I called them, and there were all kinds of COVID protocols and socioemotional issues to deal with, not only among the students and families, but also among colleagues and staff. And it was natural to blame any learning gaps or deficiencies on the pandemic and the shutdowns.

So all year, I kept sending my children to their “reading nooks” with their little books, and assessing their levels through running records, and doing some basic phonics work that was never actually connected to their reading practices or independent reading time. I followed the method of reading the books to small groups of children and then working them through the cueing system.

And I passed them to the next grade still not being strong readers. Guilt and shame.

Then I became an administrator of a K-12 school. Obviously, my experience with young learners was very limited, and to be fair, we were dealing with a lot of turmoil and chaos in the upper grades. So I left my “littles” to their teachers, confident that they were much more qualified than I to determine best teaching methods.

I remember that a kindergarten teacher approached me and said, “I can’t use the curriculum the previous teacher used. It doesn’t make sense to me, and it’s too rigorous for the children who are coming back to school after COVID. But I found the Lucy Caulkins curriculum in the back of one of the closets. I know Lucy Caulkins and I like it. I would rather do that.”

I shrugged and told the teacher to go ahead and use it if it made her more comfortable and confident. Little did I know I was giving her permission to toss out the science-based reading strategies and use a failed curriculum. More guilt and shame.

And these scenarios have been playing out in classrooms all over our country. I won’t go into the “why” of teachers using this method, or the fallout once parents started figuring out what was happening. That’s in the podcast, and it’s explained really well there. Take the time to listen.

But here is my strong advice, both as an educator whose eyes have been opened, and as a mom and soon-to-be-grandmother: If your child is struggling to read, it will impact every part of his or her life. Stop everything and get the help and the materials you need. Ask questions. Do some research. Do NOT blame your child. And don’t assume it will just get fixed at school, because statistically, that’s not a winning assumption.

Our children are too important not to pay attention and too precious not to take action.