The Reading Wars Go to College

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When Carson Bridges entered the classroom, she unknowingly joined a long-running fight about how to teach children to read.

For decades, most elementary schools across the country, as well as colleges that train aspiring educators, followed a method called “balanced literacy.” The practice de-emphasizes phonics instruction, or lessons on the connection between individual letters and their sounds, in favor of using context clues to comprehend words. Instead of sounding out a word, students are told to use pictures, sentence structure, the first few letters of a word, or other words they already know to determine the meaning.

But since the 1990s, scholars and policymakers increasingly argued that method didn’t work. Test scores show only a third of the nation’s fourth-graders read at a proficient level, and that number has been stubbornly static for decades. North Carolina’s scores track the average. Advocates of what’s now called the “science of reading” say systematic instruction in phonics is necessary to teach budding readers to decode longer and more complex words.

As an elementary education student at Western Carolina University, Bridges learned balanced literacy. It wasn’t until she began her first teaching job in the Rowan-Salisbury School System in 2018 that she began learning about the science of reading. She took a 40-hour course to become certified in a science of reading-based approach, but her school district soon switched to a popular balanced literacy curriculum.

In 2022, after the state legislature mandated a shift to the science of reading, Bridges started an additional two-year training that offered foundational knowledge about how the brain works and how children learn to read.

“I was super grateful to have that opportunity and that knowledge because that was something I specifically wanted to seek out,” Bridges told The Assembly. “But it’s complicated when this is information I could have learned when I was studying to be a teacher, instead of learning while I’m actively teaching.”

“It would have made my first several years as an educator a whole lot easier,” she said.

The UNC System started pushing its schools of education to teach the science of reading in 2017, the same year Bridges graduated college. As the largest source for North Carolina’s teachers—37 percent of them attended a UNC System school, including 43 percent of beginning teachers, according to a 2018 report—the impact would be significant. 

But progress has been slow. As late as 2023, then-UNC Board of Governors Vice Chair Wendy Murphy, a former teacher, chastised UNC campuses in a North State Journal article for continuing to follow “an outdated, discredited approach to literacy.”

The science of reading has few opponents today. It’s the consensus approach among teachers, scholars, and administrators; Democrats and Republicans; teachers unions and parent advocates. The UNC System education schools finally finished moving to the new system in late 2024, a process that took nearly eight years. The effort to update the curriculum highlights inconsistencies in how teachers are taught and how politics can complicate even popular education issues.

Though the “process spanned more years than it should have,” Murphy said she was “grateful to all who put in the work to make these changes and look forward to seeing our teachers better prepared to enter the classroom.”

“I have always been open about my passion for literacy, and about the necessity of updating all UNC System educator preparation programs to adhere to the science of reading,” Murphy, who was elected Board of Governors Chair in July 2024, wrote in an email to The Assembly. “There were times when I was a little frustrated, but our children’s future is on the line, and we did not have time to waste.”

The Science of the Science of Reading

North Carolina is one of 45 states that passed reading-related legislation between 2019 and 2022, according to the Albert Shanker Institute, a think tank endowed by the American Federation of Teachers.

The movement happened slowly, and then all at once.

Balanced literacy became the trendy approach in the 1990s, a process the American Public Media podcast Sold a Story detailed at length. It was originally positioned as a compromise to resolve an earlier fight over literacy instruction that pitted phonics against the “whole language” theory, which held that reading came naturally–children didn’t need such explicit instruction.

Balanced literacy combined the two. By 2019, nearly three-quarters of elementary schools had adopted the approach, according to an EdWeek Research Center report.

But critics say that balanced literacy failed to provide children with the fundamental skills required to decode words they didn’t already know, in part because phonics wasn’t emphasized enough. There was little research behind balanced literacy, either. When scholars began studying it more fully, the underlying theory began to unravel.

The biggest blow came with a report from the National Reading Panel, convened by Congress in 1999, which formed the core research behind the approach that is now called the science of reading. 

“This is information I could have learned when I was studying to be a teacher.”

Carson Bridges, first-grade teacher

Conservative politicians were early champions. The famous video of George W. Bush reading to a classroom when he learned about the 9/11 attacks? He was there to advocate for his phonics-focused Reading First initiative.

Congress endorsed Reading First as part of the No Child Left Behind Act, which passed in 2002 with bipartisan support. But schools and teachers were resistant to change. Many of them had only been trained in balanced literacy. They owned expensive balanced literacy curricula and stocked their classrooms with balanced literacy books. Scholars had built centers and careers on the theory. Then, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General found that Reading First was mismanaged and had conflicts of interest, stoking political divisions. Democrats began slashing its budget in 2007.

Since then, though, the science of reading has attracted many converts. “Decades of research from diverse fields, such as cognitive science, education, linguistics, neuroscience, and psychology, have provided key scientific insights on the ways reading develops and how it should be taught,” Kelly Cartwright, Spangler Distinguished Professor of Early Child Literacy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, said in an email to The Assembly. 

Yet it still wasn’t making it into many classrooms.

Mississippi, long the butt of education jokes, made the first big jump in 2013. Dead last among U.S. states in fourth-grade reading proficiency at the time, it passed sweeping science of reading-based reforms. By 2022, it ranked 21st.

When the COVID-19 pandemic moved elementary classrooms into family living rooms, parents observed firsthand how their children performed in reading exercises. Many didn’t like what they saw. Their frustration at the ineffective balanced literacy strategies spurred national coverage. Sold a Story and other media fueled reforms and led more states to ditch balanced literacy.

A few years on, balanced literacy has completely fallen out of fashion. Famed centers closed, and their curricula have been retooled into science of reading programs.

When the Excellent Public Schools Act came up for a vote in the North Carolina General Assembly in 2021, the partisan split over the science of reading was almost entirely gone. The bill passed with only five dissenting votes in the House and none in the Senate. The law mandated that all schools adopt “evidence-based reading instruction practices,” and the Department of Public Instruction spent $57 million to provide training known as Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, or LETRS—a pricey, 160-hour science of reading course—to all K-5 teachers in the state. That’s the training that Bridges, now a first-grade teacher in Asheville, found so valuable.

“I don’t think the debate really rages anymore,” said Ashton Clemmons, the UNC System’s associate vice president of preschool-12 strategy and policy and a former Democratic state representative who voted in favor of the bill. “I think it’s pretty settled, even if there are some people who won’t let it go.”

State Sen. Graig Meyer, an education consultant and one of the dissenting votes as a member then of the N.C. House, also backs the science of reading. “The pieces of this bill that I disagree with are pretty specific ones,” like holding third-grade students with low reading scores back a grade, said the Orange County Democrat.

The UNC System was required to update its curriculum as well. Until that was done, no reform would be complete. 

“If teacher prep programs are doing their jobs of preparing aspiring teachers to teach reading aligned with scientifically based reading instruction, then we wouldn’t have to remediate teachers’ learning,” said Heather Peske, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonpartisan think tank. 

Reading the Room

UNC System officials have been trying to understand why universities were so slow to change curriculum.

“I think change is hard for anyone to do anything,” said Shun Robertson, the UNC System’s interim senior vice president for strategy and policy.

“This was new to a lot of people,” she added. “We had to teach our faculty about the science of reading so that they could put it in their syllabi.”

The UNC System’s efforts began years before the recent surge of interest in the science of reading. Then-president Margaret Spellings—previously George W. Bush’s secretary of education—commissioned a review of the system’s educator preparation programs in 2017. It found highly varied approaches to literacy instruction and many using the debunked method of “using context and pictures to decode words.”

“In addition to—or instead of—relying on research about how best to teach reading, some instructors required candidates to write their personal philosophies about how to teach reading, equating what they ‘feel about reading’ or how they learned to read as a valid way to make instructional decisions,” the report noted.

“Think of all the educators that we have graduated without the proper tools to teach reading.”

Wendy Murphy, UNC System Board of Governors chair

The system convened an advisory group the following year, then named eight education faculty members as literacy fellows in 2020. The fellows, in turn, guided the creation of a 115-page UNC System literacy framework released in February 2021.

Empowered by the Excellent Public Schools Act passed a few months later, the system hired TPI-US, an education consultancy, to evaluate all UNC System literacy courses.

The resulting report, presented to the Board of Governors in January 2023, found that just a single program was “strong.” Though no programs were named in the meeting documents, several people familiar with the report said UNC-Charlotte was the standout. Five others were good, eight “needed improvement,” and one was “inadequate.” 

“For nine programs, significant course content and/or faculty teaching improvements are needed,” the report noted. In some cases, those improvements were as basic as introducing science of reading concepts. In others, those concepts were present in individual classes, but the overall programs still focused on balanced literacy, the report said. Programs needed to map out a course sequence that introduced consistent terminology and built on each other.

To correct the shortcomings, the system expanded TPI-US’s work to include annotated reports and coursework maps for 14 of the programs and coaching for faculty at 10. When TPI-US completed its work that June, a year and $1 million after it started, the system still wasn’t happy with the state of its programs, so leaders hired seven independent consultants to review the changes that programs made in response to the TPI-US findings.

After two more rounds of reviews, the consultants found that half of the program’s curriculum updates were still not adequate. East Carolina University, Western Carolina University, and Winston-Salem State University needed minor revisions, while Elizabeth City State University, UNC-Pembroke, UNC-Chapel Hill, and UNC-Asheville needed “ongoing revisions and review,” according to a September 2024 report to the Board of Governors from reviewer and University of Virginia education professor Emily Solari.

“We, as a system, had not put those standards in place around the way we teach reading.”

Shun Robertson, UNC System interim senior vice president for strategy and policy

In her report to the Board of Governors, Solari noted that those programs “did make efforts to incorporate some of the suggestions from reviewers in 2023,” but said their efforts weren’t always focused on the science of reading or misinterpreted the reviewers’ suggestions.

“For the institutions that haven’t yet complied 100 percent with state law and implemented the science of reading: time is up,” Murphy said at the September 2024 meeting where the report was delivered. “In the seven-plus years we have been working to get this right, think of all the educators that we have graduated without the proper tools to teach reading. And think about all the children in our schools that have gone another year without having mastered the basic skills of reading.”

Micro and Macro

Even with widespread support for the science of reading, the level of scrutiny caused some faculty to bristle.

TPI-US said in its 2023 report that some programs and faculty refused to cooperate. “Some faculty who are teaching relevant courses declined to make course session videos available or be interviewed, and several program or institutional leaders withheld course materials and/or would not allow reviewers to view course videos and interview faculty,” the report said.

“At least in our program, there was tension,” said Van Dempsey, who was dean of UNC-Wilmington’s Watson College of Education until June 2023. 

Conflicts over other hot-button issues, from program cuts at UNC-Greensboro and UNC-Asheville to eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, made many UNC System faculty wary of the Board of Governors. Dempsey was ousted while the literacy review was underway after he butted heads with Murphy, a UNCW education alum, over an annual award his college gave to Republican state Sen. Mike Lee.

Dempsey said he understood the board’s frustration with the pace of change to the science of reading. But he said tension between the board and faculty was an impediment to progress. At UNCW, faculty were particularly worried about TPI-US’s plan to sit in on and record their classes. People got more anxious as the consultants’ critical findings became public. 

“Two things are simultaneously reasonable: the board’s frustration and the faculty sense of being under a microscope in ways that were antithetical to what we would have believed the culture and purpose of universities to be,” Dempsey said. 

He said new research could add to what educators understand about teaching literacy, and professors need to be able to adapt their classes to incorporate those new ideas. The fact that science of reading is now written into legislation means future changes could require additional legislative action.

But constraining faculty autonomy was, in some ways, the point for the UNC System. 

“It’s not just about this one faculty member teaching science of reading,” Robertson said. “Everyone in that school who teaches any literacy, they all have to be on the same page. This was not an independent assignment.”

“I don’t think the debate really rages anymore.”

Ashton Clemmons, UNC System official and former state lawmaker

She said teacher education needs to be more like medical education. 

“There are standards around how you do certain things,” Robertson said. “We, as a system, had not put those standards in place around the way we teach reading. Now that the legislature has said this is how we’re going to teach reading in this state, I think that was the momentum, the force we needed to do that.”

Meanwhile, political tensions may be even higher in K-12. The interest in literacy has led to significant investments in professional development, but North Carolina’s starting teacher salaries have dropped to No. 42 in the nation. School vouchers and parents’ bills of rights are definitional issues shaping the incoming General Assembly–and potentially putting lawmakers at odds with some public school teachers.

“There’s a really weird dynamic at play,” said Bridges, who serves as membership coordinator of the Asheville City Association of Educators. 

The UNC System education programs have a brand-new literacy curriculum, but there are also far fewer people taking it. The number of education degrees the UNC System has awarded has shrunk by nearly a quarter since 2010, according to the system’s data dashboard. The number of elementary education degrees has shrunk by nearly half.

“I have reservations towards any sort of politics tied up in education in the state of North Carolina right now,” Bridges said. Even though she thinks the science of reading is the right approach and hopes universities will embrace it in their education programs, Bridges said she remains hesitant about the way the state mandated it.

“What doors does this open in the future?” she asked.