Tuesday Talks!

Literacy in Schools: How did the US get so far behind? (Part 1)

• Coach Valerie & Dr. Tiffany • Season 2 • Episode 36

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America is failing its children in the most fundamental educational task: teaching them to read. This eye-opening episode dives into the revelations of the "Sold a Story" podcast, exposing how millions of children nationwide have been taught reading through methods with no scientific backing.

We unpack the controversial "cueing system" approach that encourages young readers to guess words based on pictures and context rather than sounding them out. Despite its widespread adoption through programs like Reading Recovery and Balanced Literacy, this method bypasses the essential skill of phonics—the cornerstone of reading success according to decades of research. Most troubling is how this system shifts blame to children who struggle, labeling them with reading disabilities when the real problem lies with the teaching method itself.

Whether you're a parent, educator, or concerned citizen, this episode provides essential insights into one of America's most significant educational failures. Watch how the children in your life approach unfamiliar words—are they sounding them out or guessing? The answer may reveal whether they've been sold a story that will limit their future.

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Tuesday Talks is hosted by Dr. Tiffany. She has been a Speech/Language Pathologist for 20 years. She's also a speaker and educational consultant. Dr. Tiffany hosts webinars and in-person workshops for teachers and parents.

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Speaker 2:

Hey, hey, hey how's it going now? It's going really good. How you doing, Dr Tiff.

Speaker 1:

I am doing good. It's another fabulous Tuesday. Thanks for everybody joining us for tonight's episode. If you have a parent friend, a teacher friend, if you just have an affinity for children and they're learning, tonight is the episode that you want to watch and share, because we are talking about literacy and not just like our kids reading, but understanding how, as a country, we got so far behind in reading. And we're going to dive into a podcast that was titled Sold a Story. If you have not listened to that, go online right now, google it, find out where you can listen to it. Sold a Story. It's an eight or nine part podcast for the first season. Then they added some extra episodes to kind of just give a follow up, if you will, but we are going to deep dive in it tonight. Give me one or two words, val, that will describe how you felt. Just a facial expression.

Speaker 2:

She said one or two words you guys Like. She wants me to pull on my vocabulary skills right now.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, Bella's fired up.

Speaker 2:

She's fired up. I really am. So how I would describe this. My feelings towards this is like extreme indignation. Okay, Indignation. I like words y'all. No shame If you got to go look that up. Go look that up. Please add that to your vocabulary because it helps you express how you feel. Uh, when you can label it?

Speaker 2:

no, I was so irritated right so irritated, coming from, uh, the field of education, coming in to this podcast when I started listening to it as a veteran educator and, on top of that, a mom of a young kid who is learning how to read right now, who's in the first grade that is like the prime age of reading right now. It's very, very important at this stage.

Speaker 1:

So, yeah, yeah, so we don't get into it. So then you'll figure out why Coach Val is feeling indignation. Nice SAT word there, so sold a story. I listened to it a couple of years ago on Apple podcast and my jaw was just dropped wide open. I was flabbergasted, and just to give you all kind of a nice umbrella way of packaging up what the whole podcast was about, it's talking about the type of curriculum that schools across this country were using, are using, to teach kids how to read.

Speaker 1:

So if you think right now, as a parent, as a teacher which I'll grow on myself how would you teach your kid how to read? What would be one of the first things that you would do? It would probably be some letter sounds, because you can't read if you can't sound out the word. That just makes sense in my brain. I've never been a reading teacher, reading coach, reading nothing. I have not. I do not have that on my resume, but with my own just good sense, that would be where I would start. So what happened was schools were not teaching letter sounds and going around it to create these avid readers to create these avid readers, and so an example that they gave in the podcast was you give a kid a book that they have never seen before.

Speaker 1:

Kindergarteners the age when they're learning to read. Kindergarteners give them a book that has pictures obviously right, Because they're younger kids. And you're going to take a sticky note and cover up a word in the sentence on the page and, as the teacher, you're going to read the sentence and when you come to the word that's covered up with the sticky, you're going to say how will I figure out what this word is? And it's a cueing system that kids are asked or taught how to use. And that is the problem they are cued to look at the picture, try to think about what word makes sense and then, if they still can't figure out, then we'll move the sticky and we'll show you the first letter of the word. Now just pause there for a minute and think about how much sense that makes.

Speaker 1:

But this was the way that teachers were taught and educated through professional development on how to teach kids how to read. If you've heard of reading recovery, if you've heard of balanced literacy, all of that has the cueing system embedded in it. If you've ever had a kid bring a little book home and your teacher's child says they're at this reading F and P reading level. That is all part of this balanced literacy reading recovery and it involves cueing and that is the problem. Problem, and that is what had me flabbergasted and now feeling indignant I literally like imagine, um, so the?

Speaker 2:

the example that stuck out to me when they were describing this was um, pretty much kind of same scenario. Kids, kindergarten, that area sitting down, and part of their I don't even want to call it logic reasoning, whatever was that. You know, kids need more time with the books and they need to learn whole word versus just individual syllable sounds, because that's the way we talk. Okay, so just imagine a group of kindergartners picking a book there's tons of books around and they're told to go read and the expectation is that they are sitting there looking like they're reading because they can't read yet. Like this, blow up my mind.

Speaker 2:

And the teacher has been trained in this way to go around and compliment the kids on how avid you heard Dr Tiffany use that word how avid of a reader the kids were being. If I'm five, four, just sitting there looking at pictures and you're complimenting me on being a great reader, I'm going to think, oh so I can just look at the pictures and I'm reading. I can make up a story based on what I see in the pictures, even if there are words on the page, and as long as my story matches the pictures that I'm looking at. Then I'm reading Messing up kids for life.

Speaker 1:

Right, right, and that reading activity that Val just gave was a part of the program, is a part of the program, and the kids are supposed to do that for 30 to 40 minutes a day. So you're giving them free reign to go pick out whatever book they want. They might not even know one word in that book to be able to look at it and read it, and they are to look like avid readers. And so the problem is which it has been for many years is that there are a lot of kids struggling in this country to learn how to read, and we know that if you are not a proficient reader by third grade, the rest of your academic career is an uphill battle, because that is such a benchmark in those foundational skills needing to be built up. We've had episodes on here. We've talked about older kids graduating high school not being able to read. Kids in sixth grade reading on a second grade level, and then you think about this method of teaching reading and and it kind of starts to make sense, right, and so this podcast originally came out in 2020.

Speaker 1:

And so I was thinking, okay, well, now that this podcast has been out, light bulbs have been going off in people's minds. If you've heard the term, the science of reading, then you know that there has been a shift, and so this podcast sparked some legislators to get involved. And if you don't know anything about education, it is political. Always remember that Everything that goes on in that school you'll trace it back to politics. So there's been a shift. The podcast says that in the later episodes, but as Val and I were discussing this, her youngest son just what this week used one of those cueing strategies as he was reading a book.

Speaker 2:

Yes, we were. Do you hear my voice? Okay, did y'all hear the drop? This is why this is so important for us to get this out and for those of you listening to get this information out.

Speaker 2:

Just recently, my son had to given a part that he was supposed to read, be familiar with, and you know, I actually was aware that he did not seem to be reading at a level that I thought he should be on and, I will be honest, I did compare that to my older son when he was that age and where he was in reading and so practicing this little reading part that he had. Of course, there were words and we had to work on them. I had to help him and once we did it like a second or third time, he got to one of those words and didn't remember it, which is okay. But what he said when I didn't say anything and gave him time to think out loud, he said hmm, what makes sense? And so what's impactful about that statement from him is that this is one of the strategies that is given to kids to use when, in this queuing system that is not scientifically based, that by any type of research, that says it's good, okay.

Speaker 2:

So even in my own home, and I was telling Dr Tiffany that what I was comparing not just between the two kids and their rate of learning, but I was also comparing well, how did my older son learn how to read when he was his age? And the epiphany I came up with was my older son went to a private daycare, so he also attended that daycare for pre-K and they had a pre-K reading program that they used called a Becca. It happens to be the same program me and my brother learned when we were that age as well, program me and my brother learned when we were that age as well. And we're all avid, avid readers um, there's that word again. And matt the, my younger one, went to um public school for pre-k. He didn't stay in the private daycare center and when realized that like the light bulb went on, like oh my gosh, he got different type of instruction once that happened, and this queuing system was a part of it.

Speaker 1:

Wow, that is, that's mind blowing, that here we are in 2025 and we still have this queuing system in place. And so somebody out there might be thinking well, you know, sometimes it's not bad to use context clues in a sentence, right To try and figure out what a word is. I can get on board with that. But as a way to teach kids how to read, context matters not. They need to understand that. To figure out what a word is, they need to sound out the word. That's foundational. Um, you don't need to have a degree from teacher's college to understand that. That makes sense and so it. It really struck me that there's no science behind it. This was developed by a lady in New Zealand. She says she went to these great schools there and really observed how good readers read, and she came away with observations. There, you know, surrounded by books, they're looking at the book, there's quiet, they're really engaged, and that is what she felt like demonstrated an avid reader, a good reader right.

Speaker 2:

she even went as far as to say she really glamorized it, in my opinion having them go outside and find their own little nook or their spot to make sure they were comfortable and maybe draw some pictures based on what they read. She really romanticized the visual of what a good reader looks like, but the visual happens as a result of a child actually knowing how to read, so they got to know how to read first before you can aim for that pretty picture.

Speaker 1:

Right, right. I mean, if you've been in a school with young learners before or you've had young kids, they might go over, get a book, open it up and look at the pictures. They might even have seen you tracking the words with your finger and they're doing the same thing. That's not reading. That's not reading. That is imitating, mimicking. That's what that is. It's not actually reading.

Speaker 1:

So Mari Clay was the creator of Reading Recovery and that soon was taken the ideas behind that by Fountas and Pinnell Irene Fountas and Gesu Pinnell and turned into this curriculum that was pumped into schools. It came with lots of books in the classroom. It came with tons of teacher education. There were conferences held. You had a trainer come into your school to make sure teachers were implementing the curriculum correctly All the things that a school wants.

Speaker 1:

And the basis of it all was we can get your kids reading, we can improve your school's reading scores and if you know anything about education, if you come up with a program or a curriculum that lays out the steps and you can convince people in a school district that this will create gains by this amount, this percentage you got the ear, because data drives decisions and education, from a developer's standpoint is a million dollar, billion dollar business.

Speaker 1:

You come up with something that you can hook the ear of any school official and get that put out into all the schools. You're a millionaire hand over hand. It's just easy pickings. So this Cued Reading curriculum was really pumped out and the way that parents kind of came to know this was during the pandemic. So part of this podcast they talked to a lot of parents and one mom was like I could tell my son was reading, struggling with reading, kind of like what you said about your kid. I compared him to other kids or I just saw that he was struggling. He just really had adverse reactions to even being asked to read something and talking to the teachers and the teachers say oh no, he's doing great, he's level whatever in reading he's doing great.

Speaker 1:

And during the pandemic, one of the moms says she was watching the reading lesson and this cueing method was being used by the teacher and her mind was blown. She's just like wait what? This makes no sense. We're covering up words in the book and asking the kids to make sense of it, and when they guess the word that's covered up, great job, you're reading. But they haven't seen the word. So those two things don't even go together. Right. And this shocked her and she said well, now I know why my kid is struggling and went and talked to the school. The school reassured her no, this is a great reading program, it's implemented across the country, it comes with books and it is science based, all the research behind it, and so she was kind of convinced to hold on. Another mom said that too. You know, she just kind of believed the teacher.

Speaker 1:

And then her son was middle school age and she was almost in tears on the podcast because she felt like she had failed her child, because she knew something was wrong. She didn't fully agree with the method of teaching reading and she deferred to the teacher's expertise. And you know, right now there's a lot of you know people that undermine teachers. You know you feel like you may know more. Blah, blah, blah. And sometimes you're right, sometimes you're wrong. Right, in this instance, the parent was right but deferred to the teachers. And now she has a middle schooler who hates reading and still is struggling because reading far below grade level. It's just. It's hard to accept because we do trust the schools to do what's best and we defer to them because they have the degrees they do the professional development. I've never taught a person how to read.

Speaker 2:

I would believe what you said as the expert, right, right, and that's like a societal thing where we have been trained to take the expertise word for it and what lets us know that they're the expert.

Speaker 2:

We have this thing called degrees and we push kids to go to college to earn those degrees, to be experts in whatever field they're studying there, which is a good thing, that is a great thing. We need people to know what they're doing, know what they're talking about and have researched their area of study. At the same time, it's also important to know that, as a parent, you have instincts. You have maternal instincts, you have fraternal instincts. You were given those things on purpose, because it's your job to raise your child, train your child, teach your child and all of that. So if you feel like something is off or wrong, like, go with that and then, once you get some sort of explanation, even from the teachers, even from the administrators, even from the doctor at the doctor's office, like, and you still feel the way you feel, push harder, go do your own research. And unfortunately, in those situations, like sometimes you have to figure it out for yourself and fix it yourself and you can't rely on the experts.

Speaker 1:

Right. So ask you know, sit down with your kids, see how they read an unfamiliar book. That's something that's always good to do, especially at this point in the school year. Even a kindergartner has learned enough to get through a short book. Give them something brand new that they haven't read before, and see how they get through words that they don't know. Just automatically See if they are asking themselves questions, like Val's son did, like what would make sense here. Or ask your kid hey, how are you going to figure out that word that you don't know? See if they start to sound it out. See if they are looking at the pictures in the book or you don't, because it has proven to be detrimental to kids as they get older.

Speaker 1:

And this wasn't just a reading curriculum that was implemented in low SES schools, like schools with economically disadvantaged kids. This was a program that was implemented in the wealthy. This was a program that was implemented in the wealthy schools and wealthy neighborhoods as well, and one of the ladies who was really on board with the cued reading approach said that she was teaching at a low SES school and she wanted to go to the school in the wealthy neighborhood to see how teaching reading there so she could steal all those great reading methods and bring them back to her kids in that low income school. And she got up there and her mind was blown. They were using the same queuing system. Kids were still struggling. The only difference was these wealthy parents were getting their kids tutored after school. They were getting their kids tutored after school. They were getting their kids tutored. They didn't agree with the way that reading was being taught in school and they had the means to go get their kid tutoring. Now, if that is not inequity, then I don't know what it is.

Speaker 2:

I mean yeah, because they juxtapose that to another situation of a lady who did not have the means. Same kind of deal. She realized her son just was not getting it and you know, same question. She didn't understand why she wanted to get him some help to get to the school. School was reassuring her, and all of this. And then she, eventually, the boy, graduates and can barely read, and so he is put in a position to settle for a certain level of job that if he had been properly taught how to read he would have had more options. Maybe he would have chosen the job that he ended up doing, but he had to do that because he would have had more options. Maybe he would have chosen the job that he ended up doing, but he had to do that because he didn't have the options that other students had. And she knew other students who they had the means to go get tutoring and she saw the difference and felt it was a horrible guilt trip for her. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:

One dad in the podcast, same thing. His daughter was being taught how to read with this cued reading method and he didn't get any change from the school to reach his daughter where she was and they took the summer, and he's not a teacher himself was, and they took the summer and he just he's not a teacher himself. He just went back to the foundational skills that he knew, he used and was taught when he was younger and gave his daughter those fundamental phonics-based lessons and he said you know, I realized the school was never going to teach my kid how to read. And he said I had to do it myself. And it's a shame, right? We put our book bags on our kids. We either drop them off or we put them on the bus and we expect for the schools to do what is best and what is just for our kids, and in this instance, millions of kids got left behind. I mean, it just was really, really mind-blowing.

Speaker 1:

And so the push for ineffective reading strategies is something that the podcast said. It's not about beliefs, it goes back to money. We talked about that earlier in the podcast tonight that curriculum companies make millions selling their reading programs based on QA and they've been doing it for decades, and the schools invest really heavily in these programs and essentially they're buying into bad science, because these curriculum programs are not really backed by any science. If they have, they've done their own research studies, which is inherently biased. Right, I'm going to research my own project. Do you think I'm going to come away with bad stats on that? Absolutely not.

Speaker 2:

Dr Tiffany, do you remember going through your program and them like being a stickler for the type of research that you can pull and use for your papers, like peer review, like if you know anything about doing a paper and you know having citations and MLA and APA and all of that stuff? Right, well before you included that in your research and you like went into Galileo, some search engine. There was some boxes you had to check. Peer reviewed was one of them. Right, that was for a reason. And when you allow, when school systems allow program creators, curriculum creators, companies to come in and show them all the bells and whistles and promise them the moon, I mean I get it. It's easy to be, you know, kind of overloaded with all the fanfare.

Speaker 1:

Yep.

Speaker 2:

However, from my educator perspective, as much as y'all always told me make data-driven decisions in my classroom, you need to tell me that you're not making data-driven decisions on one of the most important skills that kids go to school for. Like, okay, I'm sorry, I feel like my voice is rising. I told y'all I'm in a whole space right now.

Speaker 1:

No, it is very infuriating because again, you send your kids thinking that at school they're doing what's best and then they're not. And so what happened was, if kids didn't learn how to read with this queuing curriculum put in place, it wasn't the curriculum that was the problem, it was the kid that had the problem. And a couple of parents said that, you know, I was thinking my kid is to blame, there's something wrong with my kid, he's not paying attention, he's not focused, he's not, you know, carrying over what he learned from the day before. The problem was my child, when all along the problem was the way he was being taught how to read.

Speaker 1:

And so then in my field of special education, then you get funneled with all these kids with reading disabilities labeled as reading disabilities, these kids with reading disabilities labeled as reading disabilities, and truly some of them really do have a reading disability. Some of them have just missed that phonics space, that letter to sound correspondence, and now they're in the fifth grade. So of course it's glaring now because you're giving them fifth grade text they can't read it. You're giving them fourth grade text they can't read it. You give them third grade text they're struggling. Give them second grade text, and now they're doing okay.

Speaker 2:

So, it.

Speaker 1:

of course it's going to look like an issue by fifth grade. What do we do when kids are younger Kindergarten? By this time of the school year they might be struggling Like, oh, just read to them more. They just need more practice reading. First grade, maybe a little bit more of the same. You know, it's always about give them more time. Let's give them more time. Let's put them with the reading specialist. They even had reading specialists that they interviewed as part of this podcast that were using the same cueing system.

Speaker 2:

So you're taking them out of a classroom that's using a failed curriculum, putting them with the reading specialist in a small group using the same failed curriculum, and then there's minimal to no change at all at all I was at a middle school and, um, there was a reading interventionist two of them, so this is grades six through eight and when kids were identified that they needed to be pulled for interventions and things like that, they used a program. And the program it gave them a certain level and it prescribed them different things they needed to work on based on their diagnostic. Great, okay, I remember having a conversation with one of the interventionists specialists and the program had given so many kids, it put them in a level where they were going to focus on phonics, right. I had a conversation with the specialist and the specialist was frustrated. He was like what do these kids need to know about phonics? Why they need to sit there talking about some ah, ah, ah, buh, buh, buh. No, these kids need to be reading.

Speaker 2:

At the time I didn't. I felt something was like kind of weird about the statement, but I'm a math specialist, I don't know. You know, I've always depended on others who were specialized in teaching that thing to. You know be the bulk of teaching my kids and I would do. You know what good parents would do at home and reinforce things. Um, but after reading this, like the again, the mind-blowing epiphanies now I got mad again because I'm like if they're going to read, they have to know the sounds. I just keep going back to that.

Speaker 2:

If you're going to read, it's not the only thing, like phonics is not the only thing, but it is the one of the biggest parts of the foundation okay yes, once they get past that and they start recognizing some words, they need to understand what the words mean individually, and then they need to start grabbing meaning from a string of words put together like breaking, breaking down, but this makes sense when you read, that's what you're doing. There has to be that foundation. Though If I see these letters and I don't know what sounds they are, and, like you said earlier, if I don't, if I come from a home that that vocabulary is not as rich in the home, I'm set up for failure, exactly.

Speaker 1:

Right, right, so we're going to have part two because there was so much. Just so you know, by the end of the podcast it did talk about the shift happening in reading, in the area of reading, from this reading recovery, balanced literacy, cued reading approach to now. If you've heard it once, you've probably heard it a million times by now the science of reading. And that does highlight the phonics space. So we are going to get into that in next week's episode and you are going to see the pushback schools were getting when states were saying more acute, only we're doing research-based reading programs, we're focusing on phonics, and the pushback was real, from Congress being lobbied to teachers, you know upset and it just is crazy to me. So we are going to dive into that to see like where that shift took reading.

Speaker 1:

And then between now and then, between now and next week, I want you to check out how your kid is reading. You got a kindergarten or first grade or second, whatever the grade level is. If you feel like they're struggling with reading, watch them read, ask them how they are tackling an unfamiliar word, what are they doing? And if they're asking themselves what makes sense, what word would fit here? Let me just peek at the first letter of the word and try to make it match a picture or whatever context is in the sentence. You got a problem on your hands. You need to do a little bit more digging. So we are going to dive into that next week for part two. So make sure you share this episode with a friend, a colleague. Join us next week for part two and we are going to keep diving a little bit deeper into this topic and give you some updates on where reading has shifted somewhat in this country, because that QM method is still out there. We'll see you next week. Thanks for joining us. Have a good one. Bye.