Thank you for writing this! All we ever hear about is retention and phonics. I’m glad to see you and a few others actually take the time to explain what’s happening.
NATALIE: You neglect to point out that the student who was not taught phonics as a child WILL NEVER engage in knowledge-based reading, whether part of a curriculum or not, because he or she CAN NEVER adopt the habit of sounding out unfamiliar words. My wife and I both grew up in the utterly insane Look-Say era of "See Jane run!" The difference between us is that my mom had read "Why Johnny Can't Read" and took it upon herself to thoroughly teach me phonics as I entered first grade, whereas my wife had no such luck. Consequently I was a stellar student up though grad school whereas my wife languished near the bottom. After marrying me & learning what had been done to her, she used "100 Easy Lessons" to home-school both our daughters in reading, producing two incredibly fluent readers. Yet despite knowing the basic phonetic rules by virtue of her having taught them twice, she still guesses at unfamiliar words, producing non-reasinable pronunciations every time. What you seem to be missing here is the value of practice and habit. Despite abstractly knowing the rules, my wife didn't spend her formative years practicing using them, and so as an adult will never adopt this habit. My suspicion is that as a person who probably was taught to sound out words at an early age, you vastly underestimate the effect that your early phonetic training had and still has on you.
Bit of an overstatement. About 40% of kids will learn to read just fine without being taught phonics—including many adults who became educators. They often come to intuit the phonics rules that could—and should—be taught explicitly.
That's why we missed this for so long—not all successful readers were taught phonics, and most can still sound out words.
Upon reflection, my statement above doesn't contradict points you are making in your article; it's just my reaction to the absurd idea that "ok they're teaching phonics now, so let's move on". You quote a study saying that the benefits of phonics wear off in the later grades. If that's really true, then the curriculum must be so abysmal that readers actually do no better than non-readers, which strikes me as entirely plausible. But it is also plausible that nobody is really being taught phonics. Are kids actually learning phonetic reading in the most abysmal states? Really? Who could possibly be teaching them in any public school anywhere? We are now on our fourth generation of teachers who were never taught phonics and consequently are not only functionally illiterate but also incapable of understanding the value of a reading method that they don't understand themselves and will never themselves use. Who taught these kids phonics? Did they use a highly prescriptive curriculum like Reading Mastery (i.e. "100 Easy Lessons"), where the teacher herself doesn't need to master or even understand the material to teach it? Who decided that these kids had actually been taught to read phonetically without being subverted into the idea that they can just guess (guessing is SO much easier, right?). Now assume they're actually reading phonetically and we bring in the "great books" for them to read. Who is going to guide them through such books - a cadre of teachers who have never themselves read such books or ever will read them because they are fundamentally incapable of reading them?
This whole idea of bringing in great curriculum seems predicated on the Catch-22 that we somehow have teaching staff in place who can remedy the situation, when of course there are almost no such teachers. We no longer have an adult teaching staff who could possibly navigate our students out of the darkness; the teachers are themselves the hopeless victims of their own teachers' failed pedagogy. The public school system is like a rotted building that has been collapsing for decades, left to the ravages of merciless predators. We are not going to fix the schools by passing LETRS or any other legislation. In fact, we are not going to fix them at all. I don't know where we are going to get the resources to save ourselves as a nation, but such resources aren't currently staffing the system, and the system itself is incurably flawed: "No, we are not going to fix the public schools": https://daveziffer.substack.com/p/no-we-are-not-going-to-fix-the-public
Most teachers have to succumb to the dictates of their school district, meaning that they are forced to teach toward passing state tests because test scores also affect funding. Here in GA Science of Reading became law in 2025, however, students beyond the third grade who cannot read, will live their lives illiterate, in this day and age, without the strategies thankfully detailed by Natalie Wexler. Teachers are among the most educated people on the planet - but you wouldn’t know it based on their pay.
There are about 2 million elementary school teachers in the USA, essentially all of whom themselves would have attended elementary school during a decades-long period in which the teaching of phonics was regarded as laughable, absurd, and destructive. I was reading the "ed" propaganda during that time, so despite my not being a teacher myself I was aware of the elementary-ed ethos from about 1995 onward. Ken Goodman, if you recall, was the undisputed guru of reading at that time; his whole ideology, like that of hucksters who preceded him, was predicated on the idea that learning to read is somehow analogous to learning to speak. The elementary-ed profession, led by its professional organizations, has continued buying into this astounding proposition despite its obvious absurdity to anyone with an ounce of common sense. Yes, teachers may be the "most educated" people on the planet, which means they've spent a lot of time in classrooms amassing credentials. But if they spent their time learning a bunch of BS, that doesn't help us.
In about the third grade a reading package of independent study material branded as SRA was a delight for me. I'm 74 so that was a long time ago. My recollection was that the texts progressed in complexity and generally covered a topic that exposed the reader to something likely unfamiliar so built on the background knowledge kids need. Each lesson was a standalone card. Each text couldn't have been more than a few paragraphs.
Reading instruction in that school began in first grade with phonics. My parents were college educated and my Dad was a voracious reader (as am I) so that's a factor, too. I've always thought that testing the parents would be a valuable tool in sorting the children into appropriate reading learning tracks. It likely would indicate which kids need encouragement to become pleasure readers.
about- "While California has certainly not been in the vanguard on state-level literacy reform, Oakland actually uses what is considered to be a “high-quality” curriculum for both phonics and knowledge-building, EL Education. That suggests that simply adopting a good curriculum isn’t enough to ensure good results—but that’s a whole other story." So what is the whole other story? Does Oakland just need more time to show improved results?
I'm not an expert on what's going on in Oakland, but I do know that EL is one of the more difficult knowledge-building curricula to implement. It can work well in a district that has little staff turnover, lots of time for teachers to collaborate, and excellent PD embedded in the curriculum. If a district doesn't have those things -- and based on conversations with people familiar with the situation, my information is that Oakland does not -- it can be a real uphill battle.
Love this piece, Natalie. One nuance I’d add: the “Southern surge” isn’t a simple referendum on test-based accountability per se. The pattern I see is high-quality, research-aligned curriculum + state-driven accountability that ensures the work actually gets done—with monitoring, fidelity checks, PD, and coherent assessment—rather than accountability alone. That combo was uneven in the NCLB/Reading First era, which helps explain why results then were patchy. 
It’s also worth remembering the Reading First history. Christopher J. Doherty pushed hard on “scientifically-based reading research,” but the program got tangled in conflicts-of-interest findings and process overreach (e.g., stacked panels, perceived steering), which poisoned the well even when the underlying science was sound. His own blunt emails, which demonstrate his passion for SBRR and his frustration with those who pushed back on that agenda, didn’t help the optics. 
Leadership lineages may also matter. Louisiana’s John White came up through the Recovery School District and then served as state superintendent—very reform-forward DNA. Tennessee had two younger, reform-minded chiefs in Kevin Huffman (a TFA alum) and Penny Schwinn (whose early career included TFA and rapid state-level reforms). Mississippi’s Carey Wright, by contrast, is a more “traditional” system leader (long stints in MD districts and DCPS and has now returned home to serve as MD state superintendent) who came to embrace the research and led the widely cited “Mississippi Miracle.” Different trajectories, different theory-of-change flavors—and possibly different paths to capacity-building and fidelity. 
So I read your argument less as “accountability didn’t work before, so it can’t be the mechanism” and more as “accountability without coherent, evidence-based instruction won’t move the needle.” The states seeing durable gains are marrying content-rich, SOR-aligned curricula to system guardrails that keep implementation real. That’s the lesson I hope we don’t lose in the headlines.
Yes, we need evidence-based instruction for accountability to work, but that may not be enough. We also need accountability that is tied to content that has been taught via the curriculum.
E.D. Hirsch and his knowledge-building focus has been right for many decades now. Glad some states are finally recognizing that we don't need new fads in education--the old stuff just needs to be properly implemented.
As a new teacher in the 80’s I learned that Whole Language instruction was phonics PLUS all the other skills that made reading worthwhile and enjoyable. If some teachers are getting that wrong and leaving out the phonics, there’s a problem with the teachers, not the methodology.
We have a kid in Oakland public schools and have been incredibly happy overall, both with the instruction and the broader cultural education our kiddo is getting. Even with the extracurriculars now that he's in HS. There's a particular Oakland tone I've noticed in a lot of white parents here, it's not quite reactionary but it's sort of amenable/curious. "You should move to MS if you can't afford private" sounds right in line with it.
Found this post because I am so so so skeptical of this Southern Surge after how David Brooks wrote about it... like, oh, you've been anti-teachers union for years and now there just so happens to be all this data that looks like it exactly confirms your priors, is there. But I know nothing of ed policy or resources. In politics there's a wonderful public source for survey data called ANES. Is there something similar for test scores and school ratings somewhere?
If you're asking if there's a source that rates schools according to test scores, there is one that I know of called Greatschools.org. It also has comments from parents, but the ratings are largely based on test scores, including growth (see https://www.greatschools.org/gk/about/ratings/).
I’d be curious to know if the structure of these schools is more self-contained classes or departmentalized classes at the K-4 level. We’ve departmentalized elementary schools so much here that second graders could have 4 different core teachers. That prevents the teachers from teaching cross curricular units and often makes the core classes much shorter. That’s when teachers start making decisions to not teach certain content because they don’t feel they have the time, but they love only teaching one subject like secondary teachers. As a self contained teacher, my students read 3 times what I see being read in classrooms today. Are there any studies being done on class structure?
My 1st grade teacher introduced us to Dick and Jane sight reading. Our children's elementary school used whole langauge methods. Fortunately, we were all taught phonics at home and we were reading before entering Kindergarten. We are all strong life-long readers.
In contrast, I have spent a lot of time with young people as a mentor and as a high-school teacher. I've been sad to see how poorly some of them read. There is a lot of guessing instead of sounding out, and a basic unfamiliarity with vocabulary. The nation's educational establishment has much to answer for.
Thank you for writing this! All we ever hear about is retention and phonics. I’m glad to see you and a few others actually take the time to explain what’s happening.
NATALIE: You neglect to point out that the student who was not taught phonics as a child WILL NEVER engage in knowledge-based reading, whether part of a curriculum or not, because he or she CAN NEVER adopt the habit of sounding out unfamiliar words. My wife and I both grew up in the utterly insane Look-Say era of "See Jane run!" The difference between us is that my mom had read "Why Johnny Can't Read" and took it upon herself to thoroughly teach me phonics as I entered first grade, whereas my wife had no such luck. Consequently I was a stellar student up though grad school whereas my wife languished near the bottom. After marrying me & learning what had been done to her, she used "100 Easy Lessons" to home-school both our daughters in reading, producing two incredibly fluent readers. Yet despite knowing the basic phonetic rules by virtue of her having taught them twice, she still guesses at unfamiliar words, producing non-reasinable pronunciations every time. What you seem to be missing here is the value of practice and habit. Despite abstractly knowing the rules, my wife didn't spend her formative years practicing using them, and so as an adult will never adopt this habit. My suspicion is that as a person who probably was taught to sound out words at an early age, you vastly underestimate the effect that your early phonetic training had and still has on you.
Bit of an overstatement. About 40% of kids will learn to read just fine without being taught phonics—including many adults who became educators. They often come to intuit the phonics rules that could—and should—be taught explicitly.
That's why we missed this for so long—not all successful readers were taught phonics, and most can still sound out words.
Upon reflection, my statement above doesn't contradict points you are making in your article; it's just my reaction to the absurd idea that "ok they're teaching phonics now, so let's move on". You quote a study saying that the benefits of phonics wear off in the later grades. If that's really true, then the curriculum must be so abysmal that readers actually do no better than non-readers, which strikes me as entirely plausible. But it is also plausible that nobody is really being taught phonics. Are kids actually learning phonetic reading in the most abysmal states? Really? Who could possibly be teaching them in any public school anywhere? We are now on our fourth generation of teachers who were never taught phonics and consequently are not only functionally illiterate but also incapable of understanding the value of a reading method that they don't understand themselves and will never themselves use. Who taught these kids phonics? Did they use a highly prescriptive curriculum like Reading Mastery (i.e. "100 Easy Lessons"), where the teacher herself doesn't need to master or even understand the material to teach it? Who decided that these kids had actually been taught to read phonetically without being subverted into the idea that they can just guess (guessing is SO much easier, right?). Now assume they're actually reading phonetically and we bring in the "great books" for them to read. Who is going to guide them through such books - a cadre of teachers who have never themselves read such books or ever will read them because they are fundamentally incapable of reading them?
This whole idea of bringing in great curriculum seems predicated on the Catch-22 that we somehow have teaching staff in place who can remedy the situation, when of course there are almost no such teachers. We no longer have an adult teaching staff who could possibly navigate our students out of the darkness; the teachers are themselves the hopeless victims of their own teachers' failed pedagogy. The public school system is like a rotted building that has been collapsing for decades, left to the ravages of merciless predators. We are not going to fix the schools by passing LETRS or any other legislation. In fact, we are not going to fix them at all. I don't know where we are going to get the resources to save ourselves as a nation, but such resources aren't currently staffing the system, and the system itself is incurably flawed: "No, we are not going to fix the public schools": https://daveziffer.substack.com/p/no-we-are-not-going-to-fix-the-public
Most teachers have to succumb to the dictates of their school district, meaning that they are forced to teach toward passing state tests because test scores also affect funding. Here in GA Science of Reading became law in 2025, however, students beyond the third grade who cannot read, will live their lives illiterate, in this day and age, without the strategies thankfully detailed by Natalie Wexler. Teachers are among the most educated people on the planet - but you wouldn’t know it based on their pay.
There are about 2 million elementary school teachers in the USA, essentially all of whom themselves would have attended elementary school during a decades-long period in which the teaching of phonics was regarded as laughable, absurd, and destructive. I was reading the "ed" propaganda during that time, so despite my not being a teacher myself I was aware of the elementary-ed ethos from about 1995 onward. Ken Goodman, if you recall, was the undisputed guru of reading at that time; his whole ideology, like that of hucksters who preceded him, was predicated on the idea that learning to read is somehow analogous to learning to speak. The elementary-ed profession, led by its professional organizations, has continued buying into this astounding proposition despite its obvious absurdity to anyone with an ounce of common sense. Yes, teachers may be the "most educated" people on the planet, which means they've spent a lot of time in classrooms amassing credentials. But if they spent their time learning a bunch of BS, that doesn't help us.
In about the third grade a reading package of independent study material branded as SRA was a delight for me. I'm 74 so that was a long time ago. My recollection was that the texts progressed in complexity and generally covered a topic that exposed the reader to something likely unfamiliar so built on the background knowledge kids need. Each lesson was a standalone card. Each text couldn't have been more than a few paragraphs.
Reading instruction in that school began in first grade with phonics. My parents were college educated and my Dad was a voracious reader (as am I) so that's a factor, too. I've always thought that testing the parents would be a valuable tool in sorting the children into appropriate reading learning tracks. It likely would indicate which kids need encouragement to become pleasure readers.
about- "While California has certainly not been in the vanguard on state-level literacy reform, Oakland actually uses what is considered to be a “high-quality” curriculum for both phonics and knowledge-building, EL Education. That suggests that simply adopting a good curriculum isn’t enough to ensure good results—but that’s a whole other story." So what is the whole other story? Does Oakland just need more time to show improved results?
I'm not an expert on what's going on in Oakland, but I do know that EL is one of the more difficult knowledge-building curricula to implement. It can work well in a district that has little staff turnover, lots of time for teachers to collaborate, and excellent PD embedded in the curriculum. If a district doesn't have those things -- and based on conversations with people familiar with the situation, my information is that Oakland does not -- it can be a real uphill battle.
Love this piece, Natalie. One nuance I’d add: the “Southern surge” isn’t a simple referendum on test-based accountability per se. The pattern I see is high-quality, research-aligned curriculum + state-driven accountability that ensures the work actually gets done—with monitoring, fidelity checks, PD, and coherent assessment—rather than accountability alone. That combo was uneven in the NCLB/Reading First era, which helps explain why results then were patchy. 
It’s also worth remembering the Reading First history. Christopher J. Doherty pushed hard on “scientifically-based reading research,” but the program got tangled in conflicts-of-interest findings and process overreach (e.g., stacked panels, perceived steering), which poisoned the well even when the underlying science was sound. His own blunt emails, which demonstrate his passion for SBRR and his frustration with those who pushed back on that agenda, didn’t help the optics. 
Leadership lineages may also matter. Louisiana’s John White came up through the Recovery School District and then served as state superintendent—very reform-forward DNA. Tennessee had two younger, reform-minded chiefs in Kevin Huffman (a TFA alum) and Penny Schwinn (whose early career included TFA and rapid state-level reforms). Mississippi’s Carey Wright, by contrast, is a more “traditional” system leader (long stints in MD districts and DCPS and has now returned home to serve as MD state superintendent) who came to embrace the research and led the widely cited “Mississippi Miracle.” Different trajectories, different theory-of-change flavors—and possibly different paths to capacity-building and fidelity. 
So I read your argument less as “accountability didn’t work before, so it can’t be the mechanism” and more as “accountability without coherent, evidence-based instruction won’t move the needle.” The states seeing durable gains are marrying content-rich, SOR-aligned curricula to system guardrails that keep implementation real. That’s the lesson I hope we don’t lose in the headlines.
Yes, we need evidence-based instruction for accountability to work, but that may not be enough. We also need accountability that is tied to content that has been taught via the curriculum.
E.D. Hirsch and his knowledge-building focus has been right for many decades now. Glad some states are finally recognizing that we don't need new fads in education--the old stuff just needs to be properly implemented.
As a new teacher in the 80’s I learned that Whole Language instruction was phonics PLUS all the other skills that made reading worthwhile and enjoyable. If some teachers are getting that wrong and leaving out the phonics, there’s a problem with the teachers, not the methodology.
We have a kid in Oakland public schools and have been incredibly happy overall, both with the instruction and the broader cultural education our kiddo is getting. Even with the extracurriculars now that he's in HS. There's a particular Oakland tone I've noticed in a lot of white parents here, it's not quite reactionary but it's sort of amenable/curious. "You should move to MS if you can't afford private" sounds right in line with it.
Found this post because I am so so so skeptical of this Southern Surge after how David Brooks wrote about it... like, oh, you've been anti-teachers union for years and now there just so happens to be all this data that looks like it exactly confirms your priors, is there. But I know nothing of ed policy or resources. In politics there's a wonderful public source for survey data called ANES. Is there something similar for test scores and school ratings somewhere?
If you're asking if there's a source that rates schools according to test scores, there is one that I know of called Greatschools.org. It also has comments from parents, but the ratings are largely based on test scores, including growth (see https://www.greatschools.org/gk/about/ratings/).
I’d be curious to know if the structure of these schools is more self-contained classes or departmentalized classes at the K-4 level. We’ve departmentalized elementary schools so much here that second graders could have 4 different core teachers. That prevents the teachers from teaching cross curricular units and often makes the core classes much shorter. That’s when teachers start making decisions to not teach certain content because they don’t feel they have the time, but they love only teaching one subject like secondary teachers. As a self contained teacher, my students read 3 times what I see being read in classrooms today. Are there any studies being done on class structure?
My 1st grade teacher introduced us to Dick and Jane sight reading. Our children's elementary school used whole langauge methods. Fortunately, we were all taught phonics at home and we were reading before entering Kindergarten. We are all strong life-long readers.
In contrast, I have spent a lot of time with young people as a mentor and as a high-school teacher. I've been sad to see how poorly some of them read. There is a lot of guessing instead of sounding out, and a basic unfamiliarity with vocabulary. The nation's educational establishment has much to answer for.