Georgia State University accused of teaching ‘debunked’ reading methods

ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) – For the past 30 years, Georgia State University has run a program for experienced teachers to learn a curriculum called Reading Recovery, which is intended to help children learn how to read.

Reading Recovery is one-on-one instruction in the classroom for the lowest performing students in first grade struggling to read. School districts in Georgia and across the country used its teaching methods for decades.

Once hailed as one of the most effective intervention models, a study published in the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness in 2023 raises questions about its effectiveness. While the results show the short-term impact to students “largely positive,” researchers say the results completely flipped once the children reach 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.

Reading Recovery Council of North America asked the professor to the conduct the study, which tracked thousands of students in multiple states over 13 years. It’s the largest study of the program ever conducted.

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

The consequences to students who were taught Reading Recovery’s methods could be long-lasting. According to a state assessment, only one in three Georgia students can read proficiently by the time they make it to fourth grade.

Some parents, whose children received Reading Recovery instruction, said the study’s results confirmed their suspicions.

Missy Purcell’s son, Matthew, received Reading Recovery instruction while attending the first grade in Gwinnett County. A few months into it, she says she noticed something strange. While her son was reading at home, Purcell saw him guessing words using pictures on the page, not sounding the words out. “He was reading pictures. He was being cued by the pictures,” said Purcell, a former schoolteacher herself.

Purcell is talking about a reading method called ‘three cueing,’ which is often associated with Reading Recovery curriculum. It’s a theory where kids often encouraged to sample the letters and the words in the text, relying mostly on prediction and context for comprehension. Some experts believe cueing doesn’t put enough emphasis on phonetics, or sounding out words.

Purcell said tutoring and attending a special school were needed for her son to unlearn the Reading Recovery methods. “If you could just walk a mile where we’ve been and [see] what this does to a kid,” Purcell said. “We’ve got children across the state that are products of a failed intervention.”

Over the past few years, at least 19 state education systems have banned the three-cueing teaching methods. Some states took action following the release of the award winning ”Sold a Story’ podcast produced by American Public Media in 2022. The series tackled Reading Recovery’s origins and its long-running influence on literacy programs across the country.

Before May’s study, 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 in an open letter addressed to lawmakers. “[Reading Recovery] is not successful with its targeted student population, the lowest performing students,” said the letter.

The Fordham Institute also 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.” “Some analyses lack comparison groups, so we don’t know whether Reading Recovery is any better than other interventions.”

Despite its criticisms, and the University of Delaware’s study showing Reading Recovery harms students, Georgia State University (GSU) continues to run its training center for teachers. Public records show school districts in five states, including Georgia, paid the university at least $243,877 for the instruction from January 2023 to February 2024.

“It actually literally makes me sad,” said Purcell in response to the state school districts still using Reading Recovery. “Who’s going to tell their parents those kids in those systems during the short straw? 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.”

Georgia State University defends its decision to operate its training center. Caitlin Dooley, chair of GSU’s Department of Early Childhood and Elementary Education, doesn’t believe Reading Recovery harms children.

“It’s been around for a long time,” said Dooley, who also formerly worked for the Georgia Department of Education. “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.”

Dooley, and Reading Recovery Council of North America, which developed the curriculum, consider May’s study flawed. They point out 75 percent of the study’s original participants dropped out. “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.”

May said he and his team anticipated those critiques while conducing its analysis. “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.”

Criticism of GSU’s College of Education doesn’t stop with its Reading Recovery training center. A national education policy group said flaws exist with the university’s elementary bachelor program, which prepares future teachers 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. It gave 191 college programs, in 44 states, a failing grade. Georgia State University is one of them.

According to NCTQ’s study, it found evidence of three-cueing and other methods it calls ‘contrary practices’ in GSU’s course syllabi.

“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 GSU’s 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. “That’s a big part of the reason why in Georgia right now, only one in three fourth graders are reading proficiently.”

Dooley doesn’t put much stock in NTCQ’s report. She believes the organization’s review of its program is an incomplete way of reviewing its curriculum because researchers are 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.

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

While Dooley said GSU doesn’t teach the three-cuing method, she also claims, she’s not sure what it is. “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.”

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 state university programs. “One example is Dalton State College, which is graded on its graduate program despite not having graduate courses,” said a USG spokesperson.

“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.

Regarding the example USG raises regarding Dalton State College, NCTQ said college offers both a traditional undergraduate elementary education program as well as a post-baccalaureate elementary education program. According to the college’s website, the latter “prepares teacher education candidates who have received a Bachelor’s degree from an accredited college in a field other than education to become certified in teaching children grades pre-kindergarten through fifth grade.”

That description qualified the program for inclusion in NCTQ’s analysis as a graduate program. It is worth noting that both programs at Dalton College earned A grades in our report.

Georgia school districts are in the process of implementing a state-mandated reading curriculum referred to as “The Science of Reading.” It distances itself from three-cuing teaching methods, but doesn’t ban it. Reading Recovery is still a state-approved early intervention program used for struggling first grade readers.

According to the National Center on Improving Literacy, the science of reading is based on an approach to teach reading that is based on decades of research and evidence. It’s not a specific program.

Over the past two years, Reading Recovery has launched a legal and social media campaign to push back against its 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 passed legislation mandating schools teach “The Science of Reading.” In a post on its website, its executive director said the organization was forced to take action to prevent bad policy created by non-educators.

“[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. “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.”

Reading Recovery has posted nearly 80 videos on its YouTube page since 2022 touting the effectiveness of its program while often trying to debunk false perceptions about its teaching methods.

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