Since founding Spokes on a Wheel, we’ve noticed an unsettling trend - children across different states, school districts, private and public education, and even grades struggle with reading, especially comprehension. At first, we concluded that our observation must be due to our jobs as tutors. Families are coming to us for help, so of course we would see this trend. Yet as we’ve expanded our services to include test prep, Jewish studies, high school and college applications, and college-level courses, we’ve seen time and again that this pattern persists among students of high academic ability going to well-regarded schools. Even these students show gaps in test-taking abilities on English and Verbal sections, narrow vocabulary, and limited ability to self-express in writing, especially on application essays. Many also report not enjoying reading.

Since the 1980s, the prevailing method for teaching reading has not aligned with how cognitive science suggests the brain best learns to read, the result of which is a finding by the National Center for Education Statistics that between 40-60% of Americans read below a 6th grade level. Until a few years ago, when a podcast shed light on this discrepancy, the most common method used to teach reading in America was the “Three Cueing Method”: using semantic, grammatical, and visual context clues (e.g. pictures) to guess what words are present on the page. This method, paired with basic letter recognition, was considered the gold standard on how to get kids reading fluently fast and easy. During this time, many teachers still introduced the concept of phonics - decoding words and learning how to recognize spelling patterns - but the cueing method treats phonics as a last resort or does not address it at all.

The reason the cueing method doesn’t work is twofold. First, it relies on guessing strategies that become less helpful as the literacy level increases. If you consider children’s books, they typically use simple language and storylines; it’s easy and possible to guess what’s going to happen next. In fact, that’s part of the fun for new readers. But as books, essays, articles, test reading sections, etc. become more complex, context clues are less likely to be present and, when present, are more likely to be used as red herrings to trick students into making comprehension decisions that are not thoroughly examined. Second, the cueing method simply doesn’t teach students how to sound out words. Since it relies on those context clues, students are only prepared to “read” words already present in their own vocabulary and are susceptible to deductive mistakes. Ultimately, cueing doesn’t teach students the tools to decipher a word that either a) has an unusual spelling pattern, b) they’ve never seen before, or c) is in a different language than their own. What an educational faux pas!

In 2022, the podcast ‘Sold a Story’ by Emily Hanford was released. Over its 14 episodes, it explores in detail how the cueing method gained popularity and what cognitive science research suggests would be a better method of teaching literacy. Surprisingly, the podcast has catalyzed changes to reading education policies on a national scale. Since the release of the podcast, 26 states have joined the movement to update state curriculum standards to follow the “science of reading” - teaching reading through methods that are science-backed and supported, such as phonics. While this movement started in 2015 in Mississippi, it accelerated with the release of the podcast.

What was the podcast able to do that research alone hasn’t been able to accomplish in the past? The podcast was built on and distributed by the knowledge, recognition, and care of parents and educators. Hanford, a journalist, has been researching reading education for over a decade, but during the Covid-19 pandemic she received thousands of emails, reddit comments, and tweets from concerned parents who were suddenly spending a lot of time with their children at home, overhearing and overseeing their reading education. Through extensive interviews, Hanford wove a thoughtful and convincing story about not only what is going wrong with reading education, but how any stakeholder, whether a concerned parent, teacher, or school administrator, can make a difference. It’s also easy to distribute and comprehend a podcast, making it accessible in a way research itself may not be.

Happily, we see that many teachers and school districts are actively changing reading curriculum to incorporate the “science of reading.” Our experience reassures us that it is within any student’s scope to improve their literacy with lasting results. We have seen this with younger students working with us on reading fluency and comprehension, middle schoolers interpreting the difficult texts of their Bar or Bat Mitzvah Torah portions, and high schoolers mastering the skills required to reach their goal scores on the ACT and SAT. All have improved, regardless of where they began.