Why Literacy Stays Broken
The Failure Isn't Your Teacher; It Was Your Teacher’s Teacher.
There is a moment every reader knows. You come across a word you’re not sure about. You keep going. The sentence around it gives you a rough idea. Close enough.
But is it? Do you actually know what that word means — the real, agreed-upon meaning you could stake something on? Or did you just get comfortable enough to stop wondering?
For most Americans educated in public schools over the last fifty years, the honest answer is: you guessed. And your school taught you to do exactly that.
Let me repeat: “your school taught you to do exactly that.” Love your teachers; they, most of them, cared about your understandings in life. But they themselves were taught wrong.
The result is a society in which large numbers of people believe they understand what they read — and don’t. Not because they lack intelligence. Because they were never taught the one habit that produces genuine word knowledge: stopping at an unfamiliar word, looking up its precise meaning in a dictionary, and not moving on until that meaning is fully theirs to own.
That is the Ideal Scene. A student who knows when they don’t understand a word. Who has been taught to care about that gap. Who has the habit, the tools, and the confidence to close it completely before continuing.
That scene does not describe most American classrooms today. It did not describe most of them fifty years ago. And the reason it still doesn’t has nothing to do with teachers, and everything to do with the road those teachers walked before they ever reached your child’s classroom.
The Guessing Game
In 1967, a professor of language and reading education named Ken Goodman stood up at an education conference and said something that would change everything.
Reading, he claimed, is a “psycholinguistic guessing game.” (That’s a fancy way of saying: reading is basically guessing based on context.) Skilled readers, he said, don’t carefully decode every letter of every word. They sample the text. They predict. They use the meaning around a word to figure out what the word probably is.
Ken Goodman was wrong—
The Money Trail
But he was listened to.
A publishing company called Heinemann built its entire business model on context-based literacy methodology. Lucy Calkins, whose curriculum was once used in one of every four American elementary schools, published through Heinemann. Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell — whose leveled reading system shaped a generation of classroom practice — published through Heinemann. The professional development workshops, the teacher guides, the classroom libraries, the assessment tools: all Heinemann.
When evidence mounted that this approach was producing students who guessed at meaning rather than owned it, Heinemann’s revenue was at stake. A 2024 consumer protection lawsuit alleged that Calkins and her publisher used fraudulent research claims to sell their materials to schools. The suit was dismissed in 2025 — not because the methods were found sound, but because the court declined to rule on educational research quality.
The commercial interest did not disappear. It migrated. Calkins, after Columbia’s Teachers College shut down her Reading and Writing Project, simply founded a new one.
It’s The Law
When a state passes a law mandating better reading instruction, it changes what happens in classrooms. It does not change what happens in schools of education for teachers.
To teach in an American public school, you need a certificate. To get a certificate, you complete an approved teacher preparation program at a university or college. Those programs are accredited — reviewed and approved — by a body called CAEP, the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation.
CAEP does not write its own literacy standards. For literacy, it defers to specialty professional organizations — chiefly NCTE, the National Council of Teachers of English, and until recently ILA, the International Literacy Association. These organizations write the standards that CAEP-accredited programs must meet to have their literacy courses approved.
NCTE is the same organization that has championed context-based reading methodology (guessing at word meanings from context) for fifty years. Its leadership built careers on it. Its conferences promoted it. Its journals published it.
That organization still holds the pen on what an approved literacy teacher preparation program looks like.
This is why states that mandate better reading instruction keep producing teachers who don’t know how to deliver it. The mandate is downstream of the road that made those teachers. That road runs from NCTE through CAEP into every education school that wants its programs recognized. State legislation touches the output. It does not touch the source.
A student whose teacher never learned to model genuine word inquiry — stopping, looking it up, owning the meaning — cannot learn that habit from that teacher. Not because the teacher doesn’t care. Because they were taught a false, and frankly, destructive technology.
Here Is Why The Flaw Persists
Under the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 — the federal law governing K-12 education — the United States government is explicitly prohibited from mandating curriculum. Literacy standards, teacher preparation requirements, and instructional methodology are left to states and to the non-governmental professional bodies that accredit teacher preparation programs.
That law is why NCTE has the authority it has. There is no federal actor who can override it from above. There is no national body that can say: a certified reading teacher must know how to teach students to own the precise meaning of every word they encounter. The gate is held by a private professional organization whose leaders spent their careers defending methodology that produces the opposite — students who move on, who guess, who never develop the habit of true comprehension.
This is not an accident. It is a structural decision that handed private organizations and commercial publishers the authority to define what a reading teacher is — and gave them no accountability when the results proved them wrong.
What Schools Actually Require
The Ideal Scene is not a better curriculum. It is not a different test. It is a student who has been taught by a teacher who models genuine word knowledge — who stops, who looks words up, and who demonstrates what it looks and feels like to truly know what a word means and to know when you don’t. It’s called literacy.
That teacher does not currently come off the road NCTE and CAEP built. Producing that teacher requires changing what education colleges teach. That requires changing the standards NCTE writes. That requires either reforming NCTE from within — which its financial and professional incentives make unlikely — or stripping its authority to set those standards through state-level teacher certification requirements that NCTE cannot override.
Some states are beginning to reach that far. Most are not. Until the road itself changes, the classroom at the end of it will not produce what the Ideal Scene requires — no matter how many laws are passed about what happens inside it.
The gap is open. Meanwhile, school dictionaries gather dust.
Bruce Edwin Clark writes from Waterville, Washington.
Very important points for ALL reading teachers to keep in mind. And use those dictionaries!!