The Free Press
Marian* was in her late 30s when we first met, and she asked me to help her learn to read. This was in 2007. I was the new-ish supervisor of a tutoring program in Manhattan aimed at adults who were trying to get their GED. Most students came in for help with essay-writing or algebra. But Marian, who had seen her three daughters through high school and into college, wanted to get better at reading.
She told me she was at third-grade level. Once we started working together, I discovered it was more like first grade.
This isn’t as unusual as you might think. Forty-eight million adults in the U.S. read at or below the third-grade level, and many of them struggle in ways that are almost impossible for a fluent reader to imagine: They can’t order off a menu, check in for a telehealth appointment, or fill out a job application. Low literacy skills correlate heavily with poverty and crime, and are associated with an estimated $2.2 trillion per year of social services, healthcare, and lost wages. This is an issue both sides of the political spectrum would love to address. The question is: How?
In April, a bill was introduced in Congress to expand funding for adult education programs. It’s called the WORKS Act—the Adult Education Workforce Opportunity and Reskilling for Knowledge and Success Act—and it would nearly double current funding for programs, to $1.35 billion, by 2029. The bill mentions digital literacy, college advisers for adults, and “foundational skills.” But there is no plan for the most foundational and intractable problem in adult education: teaching grown-ups to read.
Having worked in adult education for 20 years now, I can tell you the shocking reality: There are very, very few programs that do this. Federal dollars that were earmarked decades ago for helping adults with low literacy mostly go to programs for adults reading at or above third-grade level, such as citizenship classes or English as a Second Language, or ESL. For the adult who can’t read at all, or can’t read well enough to pass the GED, the options are terrible.
I hoped to give Marian the kind of learning experience I’d most loved as a child, independent and without a dull, plodding teacher. I would find some rich literature, show her how to sound out the words, and then we would just, well, read.
One of my students, Natasha Autar, was confronted with this fact a few years ago. Back in her home country of Guyana, she never had the opportunity to go to school—a fact she bitterly regrets. Natasha came to the U.S. in her early 20s and slowly cobbled together basic reading skills by memorizing words and using context clues to make guesses. She watched videos on YouTube so assiduously that she was able to pass the math and science sections of the GED, but to pass the reading and writing sections, she knew she needed help. She applied to numerous literacy programs in New York City—only to be turned away by all of them. “They said my scores were too low,” Natasha told me.
Eventually, she convinced the director of an adult education program in Manhattan—one that had initially turned her away because she “got a zero on the test”—to accept her as a student. “They made a zero-level class just for me.” But when I asked how she was taught, Natasha told me: “The teacher was very nice, but there was no spelling. There was nothing about the sounds. He just read to me.”
Herein lies the other problem. Even adult education programs that do teach reading tend to do it completely ineffectively. In my two-decade career in this field, I have heard of only a very few literacy centers that teach reading using methods that are actually proven to work—and that’s because of a conflict that plagues American education. It is, fundamentally, a battle between a progressive mindset and a traditional one. The former prioritizes the student’s inclinations, the joy of learning, and the teacher’s intuition. The latter wants strictness, structure, and an evidence-based curriculum.
I used to favor the intuitive method; I thought it was more creative, more humane. But I learned the hard way: When it comes to teaching reading, you need rules, feedback, and a plan.
To understand why reading education is such a mess, we have to go back a hundred years. Before the Progressive Era, students were taught to read via the phonetic code; they learned that letters on a page represent sounds, and that sounds can be blended together to make words. The genius of this method is that it allows you to read any word, even Italian ones or nonsense ones in Dr. Seuss’s books. But the academic innovators of the 20th century considered this method dry, and they started coming up with new methods. Instead of bothering with the dreary task of learning the phonetic code, they suggested, students could jump right into the joy of reading by just memorizing whole words.
This philosophy gave us the look-say method, exemplified by the 1940s Dick and Jane books, in which kids would encounter the same word again and again, memorize its shape, and then be able to read it. The sentences, such as “Look, Jane. Look, look,” weren’t exactly scintillating. But the more pressing issue was that it’s not possible to memorize enough words to become even a minimally fluent reader.
The look-say method didn’t last, but the whole-word approach to reading morphed into a new incarnation: whole language. This 1980s philosophy dictated that the teacher should take a back seat, minimizing explicit instruction and simply immersing the student in rich language and literature. The idea was that learning to read was as natural as learning to speak.
In 1987, California adopted the whole-language method as the primary mode of reading instruction. Some school principals even banned the explicit teaching of phonics, and books about phonics became contraband. By 1993, California was turning out the second-lowest reading scores in the nation. (The lowest was Mississippi.) Eventually, whole language was discredited by the evidence.
In its place came a successor: balanced literacy. Meant to be a middle ground between phonics and the whole-word approach, it quickly devolved into teaching children to guess words by using the first letter, context clues, or even illustrations. In recent years, balanced literacy has also been discredited, in large part due to journalist Emily Hanford and her award-winning investigative podcast series, Sold a Story, which in 2022 began unpacking how little evidence there was for this method.
By now, there is a vast body of research, often called “the science of reading,” which makes the case that an effective reading curriculum is sequential, methodical, and directly taught. It explicitly teaches the phonetic code—as well as vocabulary, word parts, and other elements required for fluent reading. And the science of reading is steadily gaining ground in children’s classrooms, although parents and educators are still fighting to stamp out balanced literacy. Whole language? It is a true relic of the past, something no serious educator would use to teach a child to read.
Unfortunately, the revolution hasn’t come to adult education.
It’s painful to remember the things I asked students like Marian to do in the early years. When I began teaching adults, I’d had no training and knew next to nothing about the debates going on in the world of reading instruction. Also, I wholeheartedly believed in the progressive approach to education. I disliked tests and textbooks. The idea of the teacher wielding knowledge and power over the passive student was anathema to me, an approach better suited to Republicans and authoritarians and nuns.
I hoped to give Marian the kind of learning experience I’d most loved as a child, independent and without a dull, plodding teacher. I would find some rich literature, show her how to sound out the words, and then we would just, well, read. With some gentle prompting, literacy would just happen, like a lightning bolt of consciousness. Isn’t that how I’d learned?
But right away there were problems. First: the materials. Everything I could find for beginning readers was for children: silly cartoons, or big illustrated picture books, obviously meant for a preschool audience. It felt demeaning to use them to teach an adult. I dug around to find something appropriate and came across a beautiful children’s book, Wilma Unlimited, about Wilma Rudolph, a black American sprinter who overcame polio and poverty to become the fastest woman in the world. It was language-rich and inspiring and seemed a good-enough fit.
Marian stiffened slightly when she saw the book, which was so obviously meant for children. But she was here to work, and she would grapple—that night and every other night she came to class—with anything I suggested.
Here’s the thing about children’s books, though: They’re not meant for teaching reading. They are meant for adults to read to children. The vocabulary is usually sophisticated, not ideal for a beginner still learning how to tease apart letters and sounds.
I didn’t know this.
I was inspired by these students who returned to my classes. Some wanted to read the Bible, or read to their children, or finally break this generational curse. Many have told me they want to learn to read before they die.
We couldn’t even get through the first sentence. “No one expected such a tiny baby to survive. . .” Marian read the first word, and then couldn’t read one. I read it aloud to her. Then I broke down expected into syllables, tapping each part of the word as I slowly sounded it out. It didn’t help—she couldn’t hear how the syllables came together to make the word. I told her what it was. She repeated it. I had to tell her what the next few words were, too, then she started panicking and rushing, and then she couldn’t read the word to, which I was pretty sure she knew by sight. I could feel her mood darkening next to me. I felt cruel and was mortified that I had led her into this situation.
Reading wasn’t just happening.
Unwittingly, I was basing my teaching on the discredited theory of whole language. The ironic thing is that, at the outset, this felt like the compassionate thing to do. Most teachers love reading, and we want to share that love with our students; drilling phonics, correcting pronunciation, giving tests, saying, “No, try again” feels mean—especially when we’re teaching adults whose inability to read is often the result of brutal societal factors. But were my teaching methods really empathetic?
With students like Marian I began to realize: perhaps not.
It was clear I needed help. As I started looking for guidance, I discovered other adult educators were stuck in the same bind. Trying to be compassionate, they were using methods that were ineffective at best and, at worst, harmful.
The director of an adult education library program in the Hudson Valley of New York told me, for instance: “We don’t use a curriculum. The students choose their own materials.” I thought I must have misunderstood her program’s aim. Her students couldn’t read. Surely she wasn’t asking them to design their own instructional path? “Oh yes,” she confirmed. “They’re adults. We’re not going to make those choices for them.”
Perhaps the worst thing is, when methods like this don’t work, the blame is often placed on the student. Program directors have told me that adults with low literacy skills don’t work hard enough in class or quit too soon. “They never last more than six months,” one teacher told me.
Some believers in the whole-language approach are skeptical that adults are even able to learn. The director of the local chapter of a highly touted national literacy program—whose website boasts to this day that it uses a “learner-centered whole-language approach” to teach reading to adults—told me: “You can’t teach them if they read below the fourth-grade level.”
An elderly warhorse of a teacher once summed it up to me with a weary sigh: “I don’t think anyone knows how to teach reading to adults.”
I was desperate to figure it out. I was inspired by these students who returned to my classes, night after night, convinced that they could learn, if I could just figure out how to teach them. They wanted to pass the GED, or get better jobs. Some wanted to read the Bible, or read to their children, or finally break this generational curse. Or they just wanted to crack this code that has plagued them their entire lives. “I want this damn monkey off my back,” one man in his 60s told me. Many have told me they want to learn to read before they die.
Finally, I thought to look into the world of children’s reading instruction—where the phonics-based approach had been lately experiencing a renaissance. I learned how to teach reading using this system of sounding out letters, then syllables, then words. I brought this knowledge and these materials back to the students, and we got to work. It was incredible. We used alphabet boards, flash cards, and drills. When they struggled, I now had explicit strategies to help them. I learned to correct, cajole, and insist that they master each concept. They read passages that aligned exactly with the sounds they’d just practiced—passages that used only short vowels, for example. We worked on vocabulary, practiced summarizing texts, and talked about what we’d just read.
Finally enrolled in a program that directly teaches the sound-symbol relationship—that is, phonics—most students went through a period of shock and even anger, asking: “Why didn’t anyone ever teach me like this?” Virtually all of them were under the same impression, expressed by one of my first reading students, a young man named Stefan, who told me: “I thought you just had to memorize all the words.”
Now, Natasha regularly comes to her tutoring session with stories about how she is able to sound out complex words by going one syllable at a time. “Did you know this method really works?” she’ll say, and then give another example. In her job in a nursing home, she has been able to read the names of various medicines and medical conditions, even with the pressure of being in front of her supervisors. Stefan came in one day and tried hard not to smile as he told us, “My uncle left me a note, and I read it.” On another occasion, he realized suddenly that he was able to read the street signs around him. “Words jump out at me wherever I go,” Stefan said. Another young man got a new job with better pay, closer to home, where he was given a checklist of tasks every day. He would take the checklist into the bathroom and work his way through it, one syllable at a time.
In the years I’ve been teaching students like Natasha, Stefan, and Marian, I’ve learned plenty, too. I’ve experimented with techniques, dropped a few, invented some others. Eventually I created materials, writing stories at the Cat in the Hat level, but about adults that my students could relate to. In the end, I wrote an entire curriculum, and set up a nonprofit, the Volunteer Literacy Project, which shares resources with anyone who wants to learn how to teach adults to read.
The whole experience knocked me off my ideological pedestal. The most effective way to help my students, I realized, was to radically diverge from the progressive path I’d traveled my entire life. I am now as close to a traditional schoolmaster as I ever could have imagined: I drill. I test. I say things like, “No, that’s wrong. Try again.” There is a correct answer, and I want it.
It turns out the students want that, too.
*Marian’s name has been changed.
Read Larissa Phillips’s essay:
In the ’70s, my mother gave me a print that read: ‘A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.’ After 25 years of marriage, I couldn’t disagree more.