‘It Hurts Kids’: Many schools continue to teach controversial reading remediation program

ATLANTA (InvestigateTV) - As a former schoolteacher, Missy Purcell was puzzled as she watched her first grader trying to read at home.

Rather than sounding the words out, she said she saw her son Matthew guessing words using pictures on the page.

“He was reading pictures,” she said. “He was being cued by the pictures.”

Matthew was a few months into a program for students struggling with reading and was using a reading method called “three cueing,” where kids are often encouraged to sample the letters and the words in the text, relying mostly on prediction and context for comprehension.

In recent years, experts have decried the three cueing method as ineffective and more than a third of states have banned the teaching method’s use in school reading curriculum.

However, InvestigateTV found university education programs and training centers for teachers across the country are still teaching a curriculum often associated with the three cueing method despite evidence that it negatively affects students.

“If you could just walk a mile where we’ve been and [see] what this does to a kid,” Purcell said.

She said tutoring and attending a special school were needed for her son to unlearn the method, and that he isn’t alone.

“We’ve got children across the state that are products of a failed intervention.”

A controversial program

For decades, higher education facilities and programs for experienced teachers have offered training in a curriculum called Reading Recovery — a one-on-one instruction model for students performing the lowest in reading, usually identified in first grade.

Used in school districts across the country and once hailed as one of the most effective intervention models, a study published in the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness in 2023 raised questions about its effectiveness.

The study, commissioned by the Reading Recovery Council of North America itself, is the largest evaluation of the program ever conducted, and tracked thousands of students across multiple states over 13 years.

While the results show the short-term impact on students is “largely positive,” researchers found the results completely flipped once the children reached third and fourth grade.

“The Reading Recovery kids were actually worse off. There was a negative impact of Reading Recovery,” said Henry May, a professor at the University of Delaware who led the study. May also runs the Center for Research Use in Education.

While May’s study is the most comprehensive look at the program — it’s not the first to take issue with Reading Recovery’s methods.

Over the past few years, at least 19 state education systems have banned the three cueing teaching methods, citing experts who say the method and Reading Recovery’s curriculum doesn’t put enough emphasis on phonics.

Some states took action following the release of the award-winning podcast "Sold a Story" by American Public Media in 2022, which uncovered Reading Recovery’s origins and its long-running influence on literacy programs across the country.

But literacy experts have tried to raise red flags about the controversial literacy program for years. In 2002, more than 30 international reading researchers expressed concern with Reading Recovery, stating in an open letter addressed to lawmakers: “[Reading Recovery] is not successful with its targeted student population, the lowest performing students.”

Prior to May’s research being published, The Fordham Institute released a scathing review of the program in 2023.

“The vast majority of the research on Reading Recovery sheds no light on program effectiveness,” said Aaron Churchill, the institute’s Ohio research director, in a post entitled “It’s time to dump Reading Recovery.”

Defending the Use of This Method

Despite criticisms and concerns Reading Recovery’s methods may result in long-lasting negative outcomes, training in the curriculum is still being offered to many educators. For example, public records show school districts in five states paid a Georgia State University training center at least $243,877 for such instruction from January 2023 to February 2024.

Caitlin Dooley, chair of GSU’s Department of Early Childhood and Elementary Education, defended the university’s training program and said she doesn’t believe Reading Recovery harms children.

“It’s been around for a long time,” Dooley said. “It has a strong scientific background, and so we are offering it when it’s in demand, and there are still districts that are requesting that we provide that training. And we believe that it works.”

However, continuing to offer training in Reading Recovery or three cueing is seen by some as a weakness for higher education programs.

Are Future Teachers Being Prepared for the Classroom?

The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) published a report last year after researching ways future teachers were trained in reading instruction at colleges and universities.

That NCTQ analysis found evidence of three cueing — which it calls a “contrary practice” — in course syllabi for 63 programs, 37 of which it gave a failing grade.

“The reason that we called them contrary practices is because they run counter to the science,” said Heather Peske, NCTQ president. “These are instructional techniques that have actually been debunked by the science; techniques that, in fact, are not good for kids in learning to read.”

Peske said the consequences of future teachers learning these contrary practices can be detrimental to students and the state’s education system. “It means that the teachers aren’t successful,” she said, referencing low reading proficiency scores in states that still embrace three cueing, such as Georgia.

Dooley, the GSU department chair, said she doesn’t put much stock in NTCQ’s report. She believes the organization’s review of its program — which received an “F” — was incomplete because researchers were not present for the instruction.

“They have historically been a gotcha organization and we believe that the quality of our instruction is very good,” she said.

The University System of Georgia (USG) also expressed concerns with NCTQ’s findings, calling the organization’s research methodology flawed and that it wrongly classifies some state university programs.

According to those who produced the NTCQ report, researchers asked universities for additional information about their literacy programs before issuing the rankings. They said Georgia State University did not respond to such inquiries.

“We don’t claim to make a full assessment of the quality of instruction in every program, but we can certainly call out institutions that indicate through their syllabi and course materials what they teach to aspiring teachers,” Peske said.

Proponents defend the use of criticized methods

While Dooley claimed GSU doesn’t even actually teach the three cueing method, she also said the definition of “three cueing” is not clear.

“I would say that it’s because the term itself has been morphed into something that has no basis in the scientific research,” she said. “Are we saying that kids shouldn’t have pictures in their books? It doesn’t make any sense.”

May, the University of Delaware researcher, said he’s frustrated about the continued adherence.

“The Reading Recovery community has taken our results and simply dismissed them,” he said. “They have elected not to change and improve their program. And that to me is really disappointing.”

Dooley, who also formerly worked for the Georgia Department of Education, and the Reading Recovery Council of North America, which developed the curriculum, considers May’s study flawed, noting that 75% of the study’s original participants didn’t continue to receive the instruction methods long term.

“So, they could have had one lesson with Reading Recovery, or they could have had 50 lessons,” Dooley said. “We don’t know the way the study was written up.”

However, May said he and his team anticipated those critiques while conducting the analysis, and that their conclusion holds.

“No matter how we analyze the data and no matter what other data we bring to bear, there is no denying that we see a negative impact of reading recovery,” May said. “And the only explanation that I think is plausible is that reading recovery actually does harm students.”

Alternatives

In several states — even those that have not explicitly banned three cueing —school districts are in the process of implementing state-mandated reading curriculum changes that align with “The Science of Reading.”

According to the National Center on Improving Literacy, ”The Science of Reading” is an approach to teaching reading using methods based on decades of scientific research and evidence across disciplines. While specifics may vary, the methods focus on phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension as the core tenets of learning to read.

InvestigateTV found that 19 states have both banned three cueing and begun requiring evidence-based curricula, with roughly two dozen others enshrining the Science of Reading or similar language into law or policy.

Meanwhile, over the past two years, those behind Reading Recovery have launched a legal and social media campaign to push back against the methodology’s critics.

In 2023, the Reading Recovery Council of North America filed a lawsuit against the state of Ohio, where the organization is based, after lawmakers ed legislation mandating schools teach “The Science of Reading.”

“[T]here are no peer-reviewed studies that show this method works any better than more balanced phonics approaches like those used in Reading Recovery and others,” said Billy Molasso, Reading Recovery’s executive director in a post on the organization’s website.

“Without that compelling research, Ohio taxpayers should be very curious about why [Ohio Gov. Mike] DeWine is so insistent on spending millions mandating unproven methods, especially considering the failure of Reading First, the last political boondoggle where structured systematic phonics was enforced – with little to show for it.”

Additionally Reading Recovery has posted nearly 80 videos on its YouTube page since 2022 touting the effectiveness of the program and pushing back on what it considers false perceptions about its teaching methods.

“It actually literally makes me sad,” said Purcell, the mother and former teacher in Georgia, when asked her thoughts on state school districts still using Reading Recovery.

“Who’s going to tell their parents those kids in those systems drew the short straw?” she asked. “Who’s going to tell them their school has chosen to train teachers in a method that we have evidence that shows not only does it not work, but it hurts kids?”

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