Moats has become a late-in-life heroine, at least in some circles, because of a teacher-training program she wrote decades ago that has become a buzzy property. She is not exactly basking in the attention. “I take it with a grain of salt,” she says, sitting in her remote Vermont lake house. “Behind that is my sense that what I would want them to do is probably not exactly what’s going on in their classroom, but it’s a reasonable enough approximation that it’s making a difference for kids.”
“This is still something I ponder all the time,” Moats says, about why schools chose to teach the way they did. One explanation she has landed on: people did not keep up with the research. “Usually they have not sat down and looked at the evidence—the nature of the evidence, the scope of the evidence, the durability of the evidence—and so they don’t understand what the science is about.”
Some of that can be laid at the door of school closures during the pandemic. But it’s a problem with deeper roots: roughly a quarter of young adults (16 to 24) are functionally illiterate, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Professors bemoan having to assign ever-shorter reading assignments. Time-use surveys report that people from 20 to 34 spend no more than 10 minutes a day reading for pleasure. Grave declarations have proclaimed the “end of reading.”
Moats’ program, Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS), has become the preferred way for schools to meet the requirements. The course is famously long and rigorous. Teachers must delve into language theory and cognitive science before any advice on instruction is given. It isolates 19 vowel sounds and 29 consonant sounds in U.S. English. Moats’ ideas are generally associated with phonology (how words sound), but the program goes deeply into morphology (how words are built of parts) and orthography (how words are written). It’s also relatively pricey. Public contracts and appropriations suggest statewide LETRS rollouts cost up to $1,700 per educator, before factoring in substitute teachers, planning time, coaching, and administration. And it’s not clear that all the knowledge translates into better teaching methods.
Moats in a class of middle-school students in Clayton County, Georgia, in 2018 —Courtesy Voyager Sopris Learning/Lexia LearningStill, whether out of native New England reticence or because she’s almost sure she’s seen this movie before, Moats, now allegedly retired, regards this turn of events with mild suspicion. “It’s humbling, it’s a bit bewildering, it’s a bit surrealistic,” she says. Finally, when asked directly, she adds, “and yes, it’s very gratifying.” Educators may dismiss the idea of the reading wars, claiming teaching is not an us-vs.-them endeavor, but if they are real—and it looks like they are—it sure seems that Moats has emerged as a victor.
When Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College offered one of the first fellowships for a master’s in learning disabilities, Moats jumped at the chance to move to Nashville. “I tromped up and down Music Row and got a contract as a songwriter and got a master’s degree in learning disabilities,” she says. “It was fun, and it was completely worthless as far as learning how to teach.” Armed with a balance beam, a chalkboard, and some visual aids, she was hired to “cure” learning disabilities in local schools. “The experience of the total disconnect between what I learned in a master’s program and the realities of the kids and their needs,” she says, has given her sympathy for teachers now realizing that the reading-instruction methods they learned in college might be flawed.
She began to observe that children who couldn’t read or spell just did not register the relationship between the sounds in a word and the letters. They struggled especially when the words sounded a little alike but were spelled very differently, as in juice and choose, or spelled alike but pronounced differently as in the s sound in was and saw. Moats came to believe teaching kids to read entails understanding a lot more about the brain and language processing than the average teacher knows.
A few years earlier, another literacy researcher, G. Reid Lyon, had been put in charge of creating and overseeing a federally funded reading-research network, a large multisite program that investigated how children learn to read and why some don’t. He asked Moats to help. “What I needed was a leader and a teacher and a teacher of teachers, which she was extraordinary at,” says Lyon, also now retired in Vermont. “A lot of professors can get up there and quack away, but they don’t really have the wherewithal to demonstrate it. She did.” Moats was assigned to the Washington, D.C., site.
Then national politicians took notice too. The No Child Left Behind Act that President George W. Bush signed in 2002 enshrined the work of Lyon’s team and the National Reading Panel. Moats was tapped to write the teacher-training component of the act’s Reading First initiative, which became LETRS.
—Lon Tweeten for TIMEMoats is still steaming about that analysis. “You don’t get an impact on student achievement after one year,” she says. “You’ve barely gotten through the professional-development material.” She also notes that after four years of Reading First, many state-level reading analyses showed improvement, especially in high-poverty regions. Nevertheless, Reading First’s funding was not renewed, and states were allowed to go their own way with reading instruction.
“A lot of people who have a casual acquaintance with the research have persuaded themselves that balanced reading instruction means a little of this, a little of that,” Moats wrote in a seminal essay about balanced literacy in 2000. “Take a cup of phonics from one cupboard, add a half-pint of whole language from the fridge, and the resulting blend will succeed with children while avoiding the battles and conflicts of the ‘reading wars.’ Everyone will be happy, and all will be well. The problem is that it doesn’t work that way.”
Eventually, parents, especially those with dyslexic children, who tend to need more explicit phonics instruction, began to protest. Mississippi, which gave all its K-3 teachers LETRS training starting in 2014, was the first state to improve its numbers. By 2019, its fourth-grade NAEP reading score had risen 10 points from 2013—the largest gain of any state during that period. LETRS wasn’t the sole reason for Mississippi’s success. The state also added new practices around teacher coaching and accountability, more student screening and intervention, and held back a bunch of third-graders. But the teacher training was key.
“The evidence for what works with kids has been there for more than 30 years,” says Moats —John Tully for TIME
Alabama piloted the use of LETRS in 2018, and expanded it to the whole state in 2021, by which time South Carolina and North Carolina were also jumping on board. In 2022 they were joined by Kentucky and Arkansas. In 2021 North Carolina approved almost $50 million to train its K-5 educators using LETRS. Not all of them appreciated it. “I’m all for the science of reading. I’m all for providing structured sequence materials to teachers,” says John Davis, who did the training as a third-grade teacher. But he knew a lot of the material already. And the main curriculum used in his school was not aligned with LETRS methodology. “You spent all this money and time on this training, and it’s not showing up in our reading curriculum?” says Davis. “It just seems like a waste.”
Indeed, the prospect of yet more mandatory training brought many teachers zero joy. Lisa Anderson was one of them. She had been an elementary teacher in Minnesota for more than 20 years when she was required in 2022 to undertake LETRS. “Another hurdle, something more to jump through,” she says. “The pendulum’s swinging, we jump on, and let’s see where this one lands.”
While LETRS’ success has assured Moats a comfortable retirement, she is still hoping that it will pay other dividends. “I hope that maybe we’re getting beyond the reading wars,” she says, meaning that the correct way to teach reading has been established. “But I don’t feel that secure about what it is I’m trying to teach actually taking hold. I think people do the course, but they don’t realize the power of the information.”
LETRS is also hitting critical mass just as Moats cedes control over the quality of the training, to the consternation of some of the earlier employees. “The mission became the money,” says Leta Palmiter, a former LETRS trainer who joined the company shortly after Lexia was bought by the private-equity firm Veritas Capital in 2020. “Not the people who received the training.” A Lexia spokesperson says improving literacy “remains at the heart of everything we do.”
Experts agree that teacher training alone is not a solution for America’s reading ills. “This idea that nobody was teaching phonics, it just is absurd,” says former director of reading for Chicago Public Schools Timothy Shanahan, whose recent book Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives takes aim at balanced literacy, but who is also not sold on its replacement. For every Mississippi, he says, there’s a state like Arkansas, where LETRS hasn’t seemed to make any difference. And the tight focus on teacher training has come at a cost to other urgent problems in education, like truancy. “Is it that the kids are getting poor instruction, or that our attendance levels are so low right now that kids just aren’t learning?” he asks.
But the ability to recognize and manipulate written words will still be a critical skill, say most educators, because it is inextricably linked to thinking. Decades of research in psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and education suggest that becoming literate changes how people reason, solve problems, organize knowledge, and deliberate on their own thinking. “The mental work that is reading,” says Moats, “is the essence of learning.”
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