Forty-eight million adults in the U.S. read at or below the third-grade level, to use the blog’s title here, American illiteracy. Many of these adults struggle in ways that are almost impossible for a fluent reader to imagine: They can’t order off a menu, check in for a telehealth appointment, or fill out a job application. Low literacy skills correlate heavily with poverty and crime, and are associated with an estimated $2.2 trillion per year of social services, healthcare, and lost wages. This is an issue both sides of the political spectrum would love to address. The question is: How? I would add to that question, Why? Some reports add to this frightening statistic the fact that over fifty percent, probably well over, of adults read below the 6th grade level.
I would suggest that the fault lies with the multitude of different approaches that American educators have used to teach reading over the past fifty years. It has been part of a movement to move away from traditional methods regardless of whether those methods work and whether the “new” methods work any better, or even at all. A similar thing has happened with mathematics where, to quote Tom Lehrer, “the idea is to understand what you are doing rather than to get the right answer.” Hello people, in mathematics the right answer is the only goal! This article tracks a teacher of reading’s journey through all the new methods and how he realised that the old methods work far better.
“Having worked in adult education for 20 years now, I can tell you the shocking reality: There are very, very few programs that do this. Federal dollars that were earmarked decades ago for helping adults with low literacy mostly go to programs for adults reading at or above third-grade level, such as citizenship classes or English as a Second Language, or ESL. For the adult who can’t read at all, or can’t read well enough to pass the GED (high school diploma), the options are terrible.
Marian (not her real name) was in her late 30s when we first met, and she asked me to help her learn to read. This was in 2007. I was the new-ish supervisor of a tutoring program in Manhattan aimed at adults who were trying to get their high school diploma. Most students came in for help with essay-writing or algebra. But Marian, who had seen her three daughters through high school and into college, wanted to get better at reading. She told me she was at third-grade level. Once we started working together, I discovered it was more like first grade.
I hoped to give Marian the kind of learning experience I’d most loved as a child, independent and without a dull, plodding teacher. I would find some rich literature, show her how to sound out the words, and then we would just, well, read. One of my students, Natasha Autar, was confronted with this fact a few years ago. Back in her home country of Guyana, she never had the opportunity to go to school—a fact she bitterly regrets. Natasha came to the U.S. in her early 20s and slowly cobbled together basic reading skills by memorizing words and using context clues to make guesses. She watched videos on YouTube so assiduously that she was able to pass the math and science sections of the GED, but to pass the reading and writing sections, she knew she needed help. She applied to numerous literacy programs in New York City – only to be turned away by all of them. “They said my scores were too low,” Natasha told me. (Dah…what are they there for?).
I should add here that the initial reaction of many people to this would be that the problem is immigrants, and although that is definitely part of the issue, it also applies to born-and-bred American citizens as well – just look at the statistics of how many basically illiterate Americans there are – they are certainly in the majority when compared to recent immigrants.
I should also add that this level of basically-illiterate-Americans is an anathema to the idea that we are a democracy – democracy demands an educated electorate, and literacy is a fundamental requirement of education – but that’s another blog.
Eventually, Marian convinced the director of an adult education program in Manhattan – one that had initially turned her away because she “got a zero on the test” – to accept her as a student. “They made a zero-level class just for me.” But when I asked how she was taught, Natasha told me: “The teacher was very nice, but there was no spelling. There was nothing about the sounds. He just read to me.”
Herein lies the other problem. Even adult education programs that do teach reading tend to do it completely ineffectively. In my two-decade career in this field, I have heard of only a very few literacy centers that teach reading using methods that are actually proven to work – and that’s because of a conflict that plagues American education. It is, fundamentally, a battle between a progressive mindset and a traditional one. The former prioritizes the student’s inclinations, the joy of learning, and the teacher’s intuition. The latter wants strictness, structure, and an evidence-based curriculum. I used to favor the intuitive method; I thought it was more creative, more humane. But I learned the hard way: When it comes to teaching reading, you need rules, feedback, and a plan. (Understanding what you are doing rather than getting the right answer!!)
To understand why reading education is such a mess, we have to go back a hundred years. Before the Progressive Era, students were taught to read via the phonetic code; they learned that letters on a page represent sounds, and that sounds can be blended together to make words. The genius of this method is that it allows you to read any word, even Italian ones or nonsense ones in Dr. Seuss’s books. But the academic innovators of the 20th century considered this method dry, and they started coming up with new methods. Instead of bothering with the dreary task of learning the phonetic code, they suggested, students could jump right into the joy of reading by just memorizing whole words.
This philosophy gave us the look-say method, exemplified by the 1940s Dick and Jane books, in which kids would encounter the same word again and again, memorize its shape, and then be able to read it. The sentences, such as “Look, Jane. Look, look,” weren’t exactly scintillating. But the more pressing issue was that it’s not possible to memorize enough words to become even a minimally fluent reader. The look-say method didn’t last, but the whole-word approach to reading morphed into a new incarnation: whole language. This 1980s philosophy dictated that the teacher should take a back seat, minimizing explicit instruction and simply immersing the student in rich language and literature. The idea was that learning to read was as natural as learning to speak. In 1987, California adopted the whole-language method as the primary mode of reading instruction. Some school principals even banned the explicit teaching of phonics, and books about phonics became contraband. By 1993, California was turning out the second-lowest reading scores in the nation. (The lowest was Mississippi.) Eventually, whole language was discredited by the evidence.
In its place came a successor: balanced literacy. Meant to be a middle ground between phonics and the whole-word approach, it quickly devolved into teaching children to guess words by using the first letter, context clues, or even illustrations. In recent years, balanced literacy has also been discredited, in large part due to journalist Emily Hanford and her award-winning investigative podcast series, Sold a Story, which in 2022 began unpacking how little evidence there was for this method. By now, there is a vast body of research, often called “the science of reading,” which makes the case that an effective reading curriculum is sequential, methodical, and directly taught. It explicitly teaches the phonetic code—as well as vocabulary, word parts, and other elements required for fluent reading. And the science of reading is steadily gaining ground in children’s classrooms, although parents and educators are still fighting to stamp out balanced literacy. Whole language? It is a true relic of the past, something no serious educator would use to teach a child to read. Unfortunately, the revolution hasn’t come to adult education.
In the years I’ve been teaching students like Natasha, Stefan, and Marian, I’ve learned plenty, too. I’ve experimented with techniques, dropped a few, invented some others. Eventually I created materials, writing stories at the Cat in the Hat level, but about adults that my students could relate to. In the end, I wrote an entire curriculum, and set up a nonprofit, the Volunteer Literacy Project, which shares resources with anyone who wants to learn how to teach adults to read.
The whole experience knocked me off my ideological pedestal. The most effective way to help my students, I realized, was to radically diverge from the progressive path I’d traveled my entire life. I am now as close to a traditional schoolmaster as I ever could have imagined: I drill. I test. I say things like, “No, that’s wrong. Try again. There is a correct answer, and I want it.
It turns out the students want that, too.”
