A battle over how to teach kids to read is playing out in Philly-area classrooms. Parents are losing trust.

As a first grader, Beth Taylor’s son had struggled to read. But in the years that followed, the Radnor Township School District suggested Taylor shouldn’t worry: Her son was close to reading at grade level, meeting the goals set by the district.

His main problem, teachers told her, was his behavior: “If he would just focus,” was the refrain Taylor often heard.

By eighth grade, the district determined her son no longer needed support with reading — noting adequate scores on reading comprehension tests. But Taylor saw he was still having trouble, as she spent hours at night battling him to complete homework assignments.

With the help of an advocate, Taylor asked the district to give her son specific tests that focused on basic reading skills. The findings were very different: As a ninth grader, her son had difficulty sounding out words and was reading at a fourth-grade level — somewhere above From Seed to Plant, but below The Little Prince.

Taylor was stunned that her son was so far behind — and that her top-ranked, well-resourced school district hadn’t caught it.

“If this is how it’s going with my kid,” she said, “how is it going with any other school district?”

» READ MORE: This is how your kids are being taught to read

Around Philadelphia and nationally, a growing movement of parents and advocates has been challenging whether schools know how to teach a basic skill: how to read.

And the roadblock isn’t necessarily whether districts have the money to do so.

The prevailing approach to teaching reading, for at least several decades, has been grounded in the idea that children can learn to read relatively naturally: Let them immerse themselves in books they choose, with guidance from teachers, and they’ll develop a love of reading. It’s a method often described as “balanced literacy.”

It can look like that naturalistic child-directed approach is working. But it’s really failing so many students.

But long-standing research into how people learn to read shows it isn’t a natural act. Kids need to learn the relationship between sounds and letters to understand written words. While some do intuit this, “cracking the code” with limited instruction, experts say most don’t — requiring explicit lessons in phonics and other skills to become good readers.

“It’s like giving a student a piece of sheet music for a Chopin piece, without teaching them what the notes are, how to play a scale, how to position your fingers on the piano,” said Stephanie Stollar, a consultant and assistant professor of reading science at Mount St. Joseph University in Ohio.

Because some kids can learn to read relatively easily, “it can look like that naturalistic child-directed approach is working. But it’s really failing so many students,” Stollar said.

Those most at risk: children who don’t have language-rich home environments, a prerequisite for learning to read, and children such as Taylor’s — who have learning disabilities and require even more support.

As the gap between what science shows and how schools teach has gained increased attention, calls for change have intensified, with advocates for the “science of reading” pushing laws backing evidence-based reading instruction.

While Pennsylvania has started to require that teacher preparation programs include “structured literacy” — the approach embraced by science-of-reading advocates — it has not mandated curricula or instruction methods, as other states have. A bill advancing in the legislature aims to create guidelines.

» READ MORE: Pa. could become the latest state to mandate ‘evidence-based’ reading instruction

And although schools may say they’re teaching structured literacy, it can be difficult to assess those claims, given the complexity of reading instruction. Experts say it’s about more than just changing curriculum: It’s about retraining teachers.

It’s also about what tests you give to determine whether students have reading challenges, and how you interpret the data — as in the case of Taylor’s son.

Not enough schools realize what they’re doing wrong, said Jackie Galbally, an assistant professor and reading interventionist program coordinator at St. Joseph’s University.

A parent in a Main Line district who moved there for the schools, Galbally placed her son in private school after determining that the district had failed to adequately evaluate his needs.

“Even though we live in a really well-resourced district, I had time, energy, and knowledge to advocate for my son, and I still wasn’t being successful at that — it sort of enraged me,” Galbally said. “Plenty of parents don’t have any of those affordances, and are blindly trusting the school districts.”

Districts around Philadelphia say they’ve been shifting their approaches to align with the science of reading, away from balanced literacy.

The West Chester Area School District, for instance, said it had ditched “leveled” books that had been used to help struggling readers. The books feature predictable sentence patterns, enabling students to guess words they don’t know, rather than sound them out.

Fully enacting structured literacy forces educators to acknowledge past errors, said Casandra Jones, a former administrator in the Coatesville Area School District.

Teachers “go through the grief process,” said Jones, who led a shift in the district’s reading instruction from 2021 to 2023 and now works in the Kennett Consolidated School District. “We used to say: ‘You did the best job you could with the knowledge and resources and constraints you were working under.’”

Until 2021, Coatesville had been using a popular curriculum that came under fire as the science of reading movement gained traction. Units of Study was created by Columbia University professor Lucy Calkins, a leading balanced literacy proponent who emphasized environment, rather than mechanics, as a way to foster children’s love of books.

“There was a ton of money invested in that programming, and the training associated with it,” Jones said. A typically cash-strapped district, Coatesville suddenly had money it could use to change course, thanks to federal COVID relief. But “we had to make sure we weren’t going to make the same mistakes.”

The district researched and piloted curricula. It also trained reading specialists and special education teachers in LETRS, an intensive professional development program that takes two years and 160 hours to complete.

Over two years, the share of Coatesville kindergartners scoring at or above benchmark in reading jumped from 20% to 62%, Jones said.

Others seeing gains from structured literacy include Norristown, among a group of districts in Montgomery and Chester Counties participating in an audit of their instruction under a grant secured by State Sen. Katie Muth.

Last year, Hancock Elementary in Norristown saw a 23 percentage point increase in first graders scoring at benchmark in sounding out words. But reforming reading instruction “is a long game,” said Brooke Vaught, the school’s principal.

Pre-pandemic, Norristown introduced a skills-heavy curriculum for its youngest students; after returning in person a year later, the district trained teachers to better use it. At Hancock, Vaught revamped the schedule to provide larger blocks of time for English language arts.

Science-of-reading advocates are quick to note it’s not just about phonics. Norristown this year adopted an English language arts program with higher-level content. The goal is building background knowledge, so that when children begin to read more advanced text, they understand what it means.

Teachers had questioned whether the material might be too advanced, but Vaught said kids are getting it. She recently observed fourth graders learning about the circulatory system, “able to identify the valves of the heart,” she said. “I’m listening to them in amazement.”

In some suburban districts, frustration has been mounting among parents of struggling readers. Numerous parents told The Inquirer they became aware of the debate over reading instruction through a popular podcast launched in 2022, Sold a Story, that investigated how curriculum companies pushed dubious teaching methods.

Battles over reading in these communities have been playing out largely in closed-door meetings, as parents of children with disabilities have filed complaints against their districts to get compensation for reading tutors and other services — including tuition at AIM Academy, the Conshohocken school for children with language-based learning differences.

Those who reach settlements are required to sign nondisclosure agreements, preventing them from discussing their cases.

Others, such as Kelly Volpe, sit for official hearings. Volpe, a parent in the Spring-Ford Area School District, sought reimbursement for services for her 7-year-old daughter, Beatrice, who has language and learning impairments.

I just knew she was struggling, and she was slowly imploding.

Volpe noticed her daughter wasn’t picking up letter names or sounds in prekindergarten as her older siblings had. She began seeing a structured literacy tutor, for $60 an hour. For kindergarten, she attended both Spring-Ford’s half-day program and a half-day private kindergarten, which cost $330 a week, for added repetition.

Diagnoses of her daughter’s impairments came after Volpe spent more than $8,000 on evaluations from specialists.

“I just knew she was struggling, and she was slowly imploding,” said Volpe, who transferred her daughter to AIM for first grade, at a cost of more than $41,000 a year.

At AIM, Beatrice has made “noticeable progress,” and her mental health has improved, said Volpe, who declined to comment on the district’s handling of her daughter’s struggles, on the advice of her lawyer. Spring-Ford didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The fact that parents who can afford it get tutoring and other help can mask how many kids are struggling, said Kate Mayer, an advocate who cofounded a group called Everyone Reads PA. A parent who lives in the Tredyffrin/Easttown School District, Mayer and other mothers began advocating for better reading instruction there in 2017.

School districts “always want to remain the expert, even though we have all this information about how none of us educators were taught the right way,” said Mayer, who is certified in teaching structured literacy.

Mayer has since connected with hundreds of parents across the region concerned about their children’s reading, she said, providing screenings and representing families who have been “savvy enough” to get the protection of an IEP — an individualized education plan for addressing a student’s disabilities — in meetings with administrators.

Among them are families in the Council Rock School District, where three parents told The Inquirer they believed that the district had failed to properly address their children’s reading and language deficits.

“I’m going to be paying out of pocket to have her tutored by somebody,” said one parent of a child at Maureen M. Welch Elementary School. The parent asked not to be identified to avoid jeopardizing relationships with the child’s teachers: “This is bigger than them.”

In a letter voicing concerns to Council Rock administrators last month, Mayer noted that “despite being a high-performing district,” almost 30% of Council Rock students weren’t proficient in English language arts on Pennsylvania’s standardized tests.

A Council Rock spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment. In an email newsletter to parents last month, the district said it had adopted new curricula this year, including a program for K-2 students “anchored in the science of reading.”

Taylor, the mother in Radnor, discovered her older son’s reading struggles after Mayer helped her younger son, Elijah, with reading difficulties.

As Taylor mentioned behavioral problems she was noticing in her older son, Mayer suggested Taylor ask the district to reevaluate him.

The trouble Taylor’s son had reading words hadn’t shown up on comprehension tests because he was able to compensate in other ways, such as guessing. (He had demonstrated that tactic in the testing, evaluators noted, guessing “anonymous” for autonomous and “chore” for choir.)

“All these years, all the goals you said he met? They weren’t real goals,” Taylor said.

Radnor didn’t respond to questions about Taylor’s sons, but said in a statement it had a “structured literacy approach we use as part of our reading curriculum.”

Taylor, who has two children who graduated from Radnor years earlier with positive experiences, has lost confidence in the district. She transferred both her sons to AIM Academy and has since sought reimbursement from Radnor.

“I have to pay now … for the damage you’ve done,” she said.