Why Schools Fail at Teaching Reading, and What the Science Says
- Troy Hubbell
- May 1
- 8 min read
By: Troy Hubbell - Certified Academic Language Therapist (CALT) and CERI-certified Dyslexia Specialist, M.A., B.A
What is the problem?
If you have a child with dyslexia who is struggling to read, you may already sense that something is wrong with how schools are teaching reading. You're not imagining it. Why schools fail at teaching reading is one of the most important, and most frustrating, questions facing parents today. It starts with something as simple as the books your child brings home. Have you ever seen a book with repeating sentences on every page? Something like "The dog likes to run" on one page and "The dog likes to sit" on the next, always with a matching picture? It seems harmless, but this kind of book is actually a sign of a much bigger problem in reading instruction.
THIS IS NOT GOOD READING INSTRUCTION!
Teaching reading using these kinds of books is not effective, and can actually be harmful. Let’s look at why. In order to read these books students don’t have to sound out any words. Often, the teacher will read the first few pages with the students. Instead, these kinds of books encourage students to use the sentence structure and the picture to guess the last word based on context. You can figure out what a sentence says in a simple book like this, but you can’t do it in a more complex text with difficult vocabulary and no pictures. Good readers never guess words. They ALWAYS sound out words that they don’t know.
What is 3-Cueing?
This kind of instruction comes from an old idea about reading instruction. Before we had the technology to do brain scans and slow down videos of readers’ eyes tracking across a page, we had no idea how good readers were able to read as quickly and as easily as they did. It seemed like magic. All we could do was to observe struggling readers to try to figure out what kinds of mistakes they made.
What we saw was that struggling readers seemed to use the structure of the sentence, the first and last letters of the word, and context to read. We knew this because when we looked at their mistakes, it always seemed like one of these 3 structures had failed. This led researchers like Marie Clay to assume that good readers were simply better at using these strategies. After all, students seemed to be reading too quickly to be sounding out the words.
Teaching reading in this way became known as the 3-cueing theory of reading or, as it is more commonly called by teachers, MSV (meaning, structure, and visual). This created a debate in reading instruction. Some teachers thought that we had to teach phonics and decoding in order for students to read. Other teachers thought that kids could learn to read by practicing the 3-cueing strategy and reading a lot of books.
We also started to see claims pop up about how we don’t need to look at the whole word to read. You can still find social media posts that attempt to show this with examples like: “The dog siad hlelo to the man.” I bet most of you could read that sentence, even though the letters in the middle of some of the words are jumbled. I will write more on this and why it is so misleading later.
What is the Solution?
In 1997, the U.S. government commissioned a group of scientists to review all of the research on how we learn to read. The goal of the project was to determine which instructional strategies, if any, were actually effective in teaching reading. The study became known as the National Reading Panel and its findings have only ever been confirmed in studies conducted since it was published. The key findings were:
We do need to sound out words. We do not read by 3-cueing.
The 5 essential elements of effective reading instruction are:
Phonics — understanding the relationship between letters and sounds
Phonemic awareness — hearing and manipulating the smallest units of sound in spoken language
Vocabulary — building a strong bank of word knowledge
Language comprehension — understanding complex spoken language
Fluency — applying all of these skills accurately and automatically
It turns out that when we apply these skills effectively, we do something that Dr. Linnea Ehri called phoneme grapheme mapping and we essentially map words onto the brain. We can actually watch this happen in FMRI brain scans of new readers as they learn to read. When we have sounded out a word enough times, it becomes what researchers call a sight word. Sight words let us go directly from the spelling to the meaning and the pronunciation. It has been mapped onto the brain. We can also watch this happen in FMRI studies of skilled readers. This theory is no longer considered a topic for debate amongst scientists. It has been validated and explained countless times. It is settled science.
Where Did Reading Instruction Go Wrong for Children with Dyslexia?
Unfortunately, while scientists moved on from the question of how we read and began to ask more sophisticated questions about what reading instruction truly needed to provide, teachers were being trained in 3-cueing. Those teachers became administrators and took on roles training other teachers. As science kept learning more about good reading instruction, the 3-cueing model became more and more entrenched in schools. Even today, you will find a lot of confusion about how students learn to read amongst the teachers responsible for teaching reading.
What About The Evidence Like The Mixed Up Words and Marie Clay?
It turns out that what researchers like Clay discovered were the strategies that children with dyslexia used to compensate for the fact that they could not sound words out. The technology did not exist to identify what good readers were doing, but we now know that 3-cueing identified exactly what children with dyslexia were trying. 3-cueing has been studied and implemented multiple times and it has always and only led to the same result. It causes all students to read and spell worse. It does not help anybody.
Remember the mixed up words that you could read? It turns out that tricks like that only work with simple sentences like the repeated sentence I told you about in the first section. Let’s try that same experiment with more complicated text this time. A Plaidni bifteens form hniavg teh ailytib to simte and use crsahima.”
Even if you managed to decipher that sentence (and if you did I am willing to bet you have played Dungeons and Dragons) I bet it took a lot of work. We simply can’t efficiently read complex text when we can’t sound out the words. I will post what it says at the end of the article.
What Was the Result?
The result has been disaster. We continue to see year after year that something is very wrong with how our students learn to read. Only 31% of 4th and 8th graders were proficient on the most recent NAEP test (2024), also known as the nation’s report card, and the problem is getting worse. This is very close to the number of students scientists predict should become skilled readers if you provide bad reading instruction. Sadly, with good instruction, nearly all students can be taught to read. This problem doesn’t have to exist, but in a world where teachers get confusing training and few resources, it continues to persist.
How Do We Fix It?
All is not lost. We are seeing an increasing amount of attention being brought to this issue by parents of struggling readers who have been failed by the school system. We are also seeing an increasing amount of reporting on this issue by amazing journalists like Emily Hanford (I recommend everyone listen to her podcast called “Sold a Story”). As a result, we are seeing changes in teacher training. Mississippi invested in science based reading and saw the average score go from 140 (well below average) in 2015 to 219 (average) in 2024 in what has been dubbed the Mississippi Miracle. We have seen states like Colorado pass laws like the Read Act, a law which I personally had the privilege of advocating for, which provided training to teachers and published a list of resources that schools could choose from that actually followed the science and which schools needed to adopt.
What can you do to help?
Get involved in your school system. There is almost certainly a group of parents near you trying to advocate for better reading instruction in our schools. We need a public outcry from parents like you in order to fix this problem.
What Can I Do For My Kids Now?
As a dyslexia specialist and tutor, I am a little biased on this subject. The best option is to get a dyslexia tutor who is highly qualified and has a strong understanding of the science of reading. Everybody can benefit from one on one instruction from a specialist and in a perfect world everybody would have one. It is just easier to learn that way. That is why we offer online dyslexia help and expert online dyslexia tutoring (Book your free consultation with our certified dyslexia specialist). However, we don’t live in a perfect world. While a specialist would give you the best chance at the best possible outcome, there are many tools that you can use yourself to help your child with dyslexia. I recommend looking at the Barton curriculum. It is written so that people who are not experts in reading instruction can use it. I also recommend reading as much about dyslexia as you can. Overcoming Dyslexia by Dr. Sally Shaywitz is a particularly good book focusing on dyslexia from a parent perspective.
How Do I Know If A Program Is Good?
This is one area where I strongly recommend trusting the experts. The first place I send parents is their local branch of the International Dyslexia Association. They will be able to direct you to excellent resources in your area. You can also look up the programs of any tutors you find on the Center For Effective Reading Instruction (CERI) or on IMSLEC (The International Multisensory Structured Language Education Council). Any resources referred to you by any of those organizations will be trustworthy and grounded in the science.
We are here to help
Last, I am here to help. Reach out with any questions, comments, or concerns. We built this company to make sure that our students get the best dyslexia reading education based on the latest science and to help parents navigate the complex school system and the challenges of dyslexia. Get the very best for your child. Reach out today for online dyslexia help and support that works.
Unscrambled Sentence
“A paladin benefits from having the ability to smite and use charisma”.
I picked this sentence because most people who have not played dungeons and dragons will not have enough background knowledge to figure it out by guessing or easily unscrambling. Even if you got it, compare what it felt like to read the sentence here. Could you read a whole book where you couldn’t sound out the words and had to guess the words from context?
Sources & Further Reading
Research & reports
National Reading Panel Report (2000) — National Institute of Child Health & Human Development
NAEP 2024 Nation's Report Card — National Center for Education Statistics
Dr. Linnea Ehri — Phoneme-Grapheme Mapping research (see her work published via ResearchGate)
Marie Clay — Origins of the 3-Cueing / MSV model
Journalism & media
"Sold a Story" podcast — Emily Hanford, APM Reports
Trusted organizations
International Dyslexia Association (IDA) — Find a local branch and vetted resources
Center for Effective Reading Instruction (CERI) — Program verification & tutor lookup
IMSLEC — International Multisensory Structured Language Education Council
Recommended reading for parents
Barton Reading and Spelling System — Parent-friendly structured literacy curriculum
Policy & state initiatives
Mississippi Miracle — NAEP score improvements 2015–2024 via the Mississippi Department of Education
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