I was 11 years old when I was finally taught how to read. Today, millions of other kids aren't being taught either.

Today, on National Read Across America Day, I have a confession: I was eleven years old when I was finally taught how to read. Why am I admitting this publicly? Because the downward spiral that can start with early literacy problems is the nation's greatest source of inequality. Nearly every issue I care about — from child poverty and homelessness, to mass incarceration and mental health — would significantly improve with higher literacy rates.?

With few exceptions, I’ve kept my early literacy struggles hidden from most of my professional and social circles. While there is no correlation between literacy and IQ, there has always been too much fear, shame and stigma to disclose it. But just before the new year, my mom texted me a link to a podcast that changed me.

"Listen to this," my mom wrote. "This is what happened to you."

Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went so Wrong, a podcast by American Public Media's Emily Hanford, explains why, in the 90’s, I wasn’t taught how to read. Except that it’s not about me at all — it’s about why millions of other kids aren’t being taught how to read either — today, nearly 30 years later. The podcast, while educational and well researched, is also riveting, infuriating, full of character development, plot twists and cliff hangers — there's nothing dry about it.

Sold a Story shook me — not because I didn’t know the story — but because I was devastated by how grave the problem still is today despite the 40+ years of scientific evidence we have about how children learn to read that, if harnessed nationally, would drastically improve literacy outcomes.

Since 1992, the number of fourth graders in the U.S. reading below grade-level proficiency has been hovering flat at around 66 percent. For students experiencing poverty, it’s even more dire — 82 percent of students eligible for free or reduced lunches are not reading at or above proficient levels. As Emily Hanford states in Jenny Mackenzie and LaVar Burton's documentary film, The Right to Read, "we have a lot of people who can't read... Why aren't we screaming and yelling about this?"

The lifelong risks of low literacy are immeasurable.?

Literacy is a civil right. Illiteracy affects a person's ability to fully participate in and contribute to the world around them. Struggling readers are more likely to report feeling sad, lonely, angry, anxious and depressed — which make behavioral, mental health and drug problems more likely. Their poor reading skills make it hard for them to keep up in other subject areas and make them less likely to graduate high school, find a job and become financially independent.

It’s estimated that 70 percent of people incarcerated in the U.S. read below a third grade-level, and the same is true for upwards of 46 percent of the homeless population. A 2020 study by Gallup estimates that low levels of literacy in adults could be costing the U.S. up to $2.2 trillion per year.

Across the U.S., children aren’t being taught the skills needed to become proficient readers

I’m dyslexic which, without question, made learning to read more difficult. But that’s only half of my story. Vastly compounding the problem was that, from grades k-5, I wasn’t taught how to read. Despite growing up in Larchmont, New York, an affluent?suburb of New York City with “great public schools,” my school held a philosophy about reading that was based on an idea that had been debunked by neuroscientists over a decade earlier. According to an EdWeek Research Center survey from 2019, this false idea, explored in Sold a Story, still underpins curriculums prevalent in over 75 percent of k-2 schools and 65 percent of teacher prep programs.

The idea? That humans are hard-wired to read. That we learn to read as naturally as we learn to talk. That you don’t have to teach kids about letter-sound relationships, because there are other, easier ways to figure out what the words are — such as encouraging young readers to guess the words on the page using contextual and pictorial clues.

This harmful strategy, called “3-cuing,” is how I was initially "taught" to read. Instead of encouraging students to sound out the letters when they come across a word they don't know, my teachers would tell me to look at the first letter, look at the picture, and think of a word that makes sense. Ultimately, I was made to feel successful by guessing and memorizing full words.

Some states are starting to ban the 3-cuing strategy, popular in Whole Language and Balanced Literacy curriculums, because research shows that it teaches children reading strategies that poor readers use. In order to read, the brain relies on a network of systems, each meant for distinct things like language, vision and cognition. To reach proficiency, beginning readers need to create new neural pathways to connect these systems, but for a lot of students, 3-cuing prevents these pathways from being built. One of the most replicated findings in reading research is that the ability to read words in isolation instantly and accurately is the hallmark of being a skilled reader. It is less-skilled readers who are more dependent on context and picture clues for word recognition.

Once I received explicit, evidence-based instruction grounded in science, I jumped eight grade levels in less than a year.

I remember fighting back tears as my mom and I pulled up to my new reading tutor's house. This tutor specialized in teaching dyslexic children how to read. I was terrified as I mentally prepared myself for my first lesson. I was acutely aware that if this tutor couldn't teach me, it was likely that no one could. This was my last shot.

A lot of kids don't remember learning how to read, but I do. My tutor, a petite, older woman named Mrs. Harrison, was authentically kind and treated me with the dignity I so desperately needed from an educator. She started by teaching me some foundational grapheme-phoneme relationships in a structured, systematic, multi-sensory approach that made what I was learning fun and easy to remember. Every new lesson built off of the one before it. Then she gave me "decodable books" to practice what I had just been taught. Decodable books are simple books that are written for beginning readers and contain the specific grapheme–phoneme correspondences students have already learned so the child is set up for success. After just a few weeks of lessons, I remember reading a decodable book and asking myself, "why didn't anyone think to teach me this way earlier?" It seemed so obvious.

Yet, before this, I had been going into school every day thinking I was deficient and feeling like a burden. About a month or two into my tutoring I was beginning to wonder who was more deficient: me, for my dyslexia, or my school for not knowing how to teach children with dyslexia how to read — a common learning difference that effects roughly 1 in 5 children. In less than a year of tutoring, I went from a kindergarten to an eighth grade reading level -- something my school teachers and administrators had previously not thought was possible.

The approach, called Orton-Gillingham, was thoughtfully designed to pave those neural pathways. My mom, confounded by the results, decided to go back to school to get a masters degree as a learning specialist. She's been teaching children to read, teaching teachers how to teach and traveling to brain conferences to keep up with the latest science for the last 25+ years.

Low literacy is not a poverty problem — it’s a curriculum issue

Admittedly, I’m nervous to talk so candidly about my struggles with literacy. But the most painful part of my dyslexia wasn’t the humiliation from being forced to read out loud in class, the public shame of not turning in my homework because I couldn’t read it, or the loneliness of being educationally neglected despite having plenty of classmates silently suffering along with me.

The most painful part was the survivor's guilt that came after I learned to read: the guilt of knowing that most of my black and brown struggling peers wouldn’t be able to afford or access the help I got and the anger that kids like me wouldn’t have to experience this type of trauma if schools were required to use (and teacher-prep programs were required to teach) proven, high-efficacy literacy curriculums.?

Children of color disproportionately bear the brunt of this crisis, in part because access to a dyslexia diagnosis and trained tutors is prohibitively expensive, constrained and hard to navigate — but also because there’s a misconception that low levels of literacy is a poverty problem. Too often, learning standards are lowered for black and brown students. As a society, we’ve come to believe our dismal reading scores are “just the way it is” due to economic disparity. We blame parents for working two jobs, not reading to their kids enough or not being native English speakers.

And yet, scientists have proven repeatedly that 95+ percent of children are capable of learning to read when given instruction that aligns with what we know about brain science. Issues like poverty, troubled home lives, learning disabilities and English as a second language largely don't matter. A parent could read 100 books to their child every day, and while a great thing to do for a host of other reasons (like building vocabulary, knowledge, and auditory comprehension skills) it's not the same thing as teaching a child to read. This is, overwhelmingly, a curriculum issue.

Look at Mississippi and Tennessee, states with some of the highest numbers of students on free lunch. These two states were tired of having the lowest reading scores in the nation for decades, so they overhauled their literacy curriculum by re-training their k-2 teachers in the science of reading.?Mississippi went further and required that students get screened for dyslexia and that all state colleges and universities add the science of reading to their curriculum for teacher training programs. And in the years since these changes, Mississippi and Tennessee students have made outstanding literacy gains and are now ranked roughly average in the nation. Their work is far from over — but the leaps they've made in just a few short years should serve as a roadmap for the nation.?

If that’s not enough to convince you, look at Bronxville, New York — a predominantly white suburb of New York City and one of the wealthiest zip codes in the country with virtually no students on free lunch — with 26 percent of fifth grade students reading below grade-level proficiency in 2018.?

30 percent of struggling readers come from college educated parents. The difference is that these groups of parents tend to be better positioned, financially and otherwise, to either pay top dollar to get their kids help (albeit late), or sue and force their child’s school to pay for it with tax payers' dollars.

If you think this is just a public school issue, think again. Many elite private schools (institutions that charge parents $50k+ annually per student) teach reading using curriculums based on debunked "whole language" and "balanced literacy" educational philosophies.

As Kareem Weaver, an Oakland NAACP activist and teacher featured in The Right to Read documentary points out: "[literacy] is a national problem that cuts across demographics, but it's painted as a minority issue... The question is today, do we have the political will, and do we have the moral courage and fortitude, to use literacy as a vehicle to include all?"

What is Dyslexia, exactly?

Dyslexia is a language decoding disorder that effects roughly 10-20 percent of the population. Dyslexia is defined as an "unexpected" difficulty with reading, and therefore, to be diagnosed, you must have average or above average intelligence. There are four types of Dyslexia, but the most common weakness that dyslexics share is poor phonemic awareness — the skill that lays the foundation for literacy. Phonemes are the smallest units of sound that make up words, and there are 44 of them in the English language. For example, the word “chat” is made up of three phonemes: /ch/ /a/ /t/. Phonemic awareness is not only the recognition that words are made up of individual, micro sound units, it is also the ability to break down, manipulate and blend phonemes, and then connect these phonemes with graphemes (the letters or groups of letters that represent the phonemes). For a lot of students — especially those with Dyslexia — this awareness isn’t intuitive and needs to be taught.

Contrary to popular belief, Dyslexia is not a visual issue – we can see the letters on the page the same way anyone else can. In fact, all beginning readers confuse letters based on their orientation because of something called mirror generalization. Mirror generalization is our brain's ability to recognize an object regardless of its rotation – a spatial process that many dyslexics are exceptionally good at, but have to be taught to suppress when learning the alphabet.

With regards to intervention and support, the ideal time to diagnose a child with dyslexia is at or before age 5, before a child has had the chance to fail at reading. Some early indicators of dyslexia to look out for in children include:

1. a family history of dyslexia or low literacy,
2. a history of severe or prolonged ear infections during infancy
3. delayed speech in early development
4. difficulty hearing when words do or don't rhyme, poor auditory discrimination, confusing words that follow similar speech patterns (e.g. tomato and potato)
5. frequently jumbling words (e.g. "cubumber" instead of "cucumber")
6. difficulty learning and remembering the alphabet

While there is no silver bullet curriculum to teach all kids to read, efficacy levels vary widely (some approaches, like 3-cuing, are even harmful), and studies have shown that if all kids were taught to read the way dyslexic kids need to be taught (structured, explicit, systematic and cumulative instruction), every groups reading and spelling performance would vastly improve. The previously “good” readers would become excellent readers.

What you can do to help

In recognition of National Read Across America Day, please listen to the Sold a Story podcast if you haven’t already. If you have kids, if you’re a teacher, school administrator or if you care about civil rights – it’s a must listen. Spread the word and share it on social media.

From March 2nd through March 9th, you can watch The Right to Read documentary for free. This documentary, directed by Jenny Mackenzie and produced by LaVar Burton of Reading Rainbow, features stories of Kareem Weaver, an Oakland NAACP activist, a teacher and two American families who fight to provide our youngest generation with the ability to read.

If you live in New York State, please call or write your Senate and Assembly representatives and ask them to support Robert Carroll’s Dyslexia Task Force Bill. Every child deserves the , and this bill is a crucial first step to ensuring that. Last year, a similar bill passed through every legislative branch, but it was later vetoed when it got to Governor Kathy Hochul’s desk. We can’t let that happen again.

If your child is struggling to read and you’re looking to take matters into your own hands but can’t afford a tutor – you are not alone. Many parents have found this evidence-based instructional book to be very helpful: Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons: Revised and Updated Second Edition.

Lastly, if you're concerned or curious about literacy rates in your district, you should be able to look them up online (although it may take some sleuthing). If you live in New York State, you can look up them up using this handy online tool. If the rates are low, contact the local school board and/or superintendent, and ask them if they are using evidence-based instruction. Tell them you want your tax-payer dollars going to proven, high-efficacy reading curriculums. The following questions from Nathaniel Hansford, author of The Scientific Principles of Teaching, can be a helpful starting point:

1.?Does the district or school have explicit phonics scope and sequence instruction?

2.?Is the instruction explicit?

3.?Does it include Phonemic Awareness? (this skill lays the foundation for literacy, and for most students, it needs to be taught but it often isn’t)

4.?Does it include spelling?

5.?Does it have any experimental research?

6.?Does the experimental research show significant results?

7.?Does it include fluency instruction?

Secondary questions to ask:

1.?Does it have morphology instruction?

2.?Are decodable texts used?

3.?Does phonemic awareness instruction include letters?

4.?Is there comprehension instruction included?

5.?Is there vocabulary instruction included?

If you managed to read this far, thank you, and happy National Read Across America Day.