Author Talk: September 19, 2024

Irene Daria is a cognitive developmental psychologist who specializes in teaching children how to read, including those of Kate Winslet, Cate Blanchett, and Tom Brady and Bridget Moynahan. At the time of her memoir, I DIDN’T BELIEVE HIM, she was thrilled that her son had been accepted to one of the most esteemed public schools in Manhattan. Believing that he was on the path to a venerable education, she did not listen when her five-year-old told her that he --- like millions of other children --- was not being taught how to read in school. An entire, very painful school year passed before Eric got her to realize he was right. Follow along as Daria begins a perplexing but ultimately empowering journey to save his academic life, which she talks about in this insightful and eye-opening interview.

Question: As a psychologist, what made you specialize in teaching children how to read?

Irene Daria, PhD: When he was five years old, my son came home from kindergarten and said: “I want to learn how to read, Mommy, but my school isn’t teaching me how to. They tell us to look at the pictures and guess what the words are, but that’s not reading, Mommy. How do you read?”

At age five, Eric was smart enough to know he was not learning how to read in school. He was smart enough to know the problem was caused by the way he was being taught to do it. And he was smart enough to ask for help.

I was not smart enough to listen.

Instead of saying I would help him, I uttered words I would live to regret: “I don’t understand how your school teaches reading, but it’s a really good school and we need to trust that they know what they are doing. They will teach you how to read.”​

His kindergarten and first grade teachers never did teach him to read, and because they did not, they sent my bright little boy on a horrific, downward academic spiral. I don’t want any child to, ever, have to go through what my son experienced. If I had left my son’s learning how to read up to his school (which is one of the most highly regarded public schools in Manhattan, by the way), he would have probably ended up in remedial education for the rest of his academic life. Like most children who do not learn to read well in the early grades, there is a great chance he would have tuned out to school completely.

Kindergarten was a disaster for him. He had nightmares and, every day, would say he didn’t want to go to school. I had no idea what the problem was. I had no idea the issue was that he had no idea how to read and was feeling upset and ashamed about that. I thought he was reading fine because he seemed able to read the little patterned books he brought home from school, and he had excellent grades in reading on his report card. In first grade, he, finally, got me to realize he had no idea how to read. He did that by, angrily, saying, “Want to see how I read, Mommy?” He then held a book behind his back and “read” it out loud, turning each page at exactly the right moment, while holding it behind his back the entire time. He “read”: “A house is a home. A teepee is a home. An igloo is a home.” And so on. That’s when I realized he had memorized every book his teacher sent home with him and that he had no idea how to actually read the words in them. I felt such terrible guilt that I had not listened to him sooner, and I began teaching him how to read myself.

At the time --- this was in 2007 --- I was studying towards a Ph.D. in psychology, and I began reading everything I could about how children learn to read. I learned that most schools were using a method called Balanced Literacy, or three-cueing. That method gives beginning readers books they can’t possibly read and teaches them to guess what the words could be by looking at the pictures, or by using the rest of the sentence, or just the first letter of a word to guess what a word could be. Schools were actively teaching children to read the way dyslexic children read. There have actually been articles written called, “Is it dyslexia or dysteachia?”

Q. Are you saying poor teaching methods actually caused children to become dyslexic?

ID: Yes. Millions of children in this country have been labeled learning disabled and referred to special education services simply because their schools did not teach them phonics in an explicit, systematic way. These kids were actually not learning disabled at all. They had absolutely no neurological impairments. I wanted to help those children.

Q. So you began tutoring?

ID: Not quite. Before going back to grad school to study psychology, I had worked as a writer and editor. I had been a reporter at Women’s Wear Daily, an editor at Harper’s Bazaar, and parenting editor at Woman’s World. I am the author of three nonfiction books and have written hundreds of articles for various newspapers and magazines. There is an ingrained need in me to share information. That is especially true when I learn about something unjust, or harmful. I wanted to write an article about how terrible it was that perfectly capable children were being labeled learning disabled just because their teachers weren’t teaching them how to read. But I had a heavy work load in graduate school and also had a family to care for. My two children were young at the time.

I didn’t have time to write an article, but when I heard that my local library in Manhattan was hosting an event on how children learn to read, I decided to attend and see if I could spread the word about what was happening. The opportunity to do so arose quickly because the librarian who was giving the presentation was under the assumption that the children in the upscale West Village neighborhood where this library is located were learning phonics in school.

I raised my hand and, politely, said that certainly wasn’t true in the West Village, or in most of Manhattan. I told her, and the audience, that the curriculum in most public schools, and in some private schools, was Balanced Literacy. (The specific name of it was Units of Study from Lucy Calkins at Teachers College at Columbia University.) I told them how that curriculum was failing many children and described what happens when children do not learn to read in the classroom.

Q. What does happen when a child doesn’t learn to read in school?

ID: A terrible downward spiral. Little kids will never raise their hands and tell their teachers they don’t understand something. Children do not yet know that asking questions is the sign of a confident and smart student. Instead, little kids think they are the only ones who don’t understand something, and no little kid wants to be singled out like that. So, instead of saying they have no idea what the teacher is talking about, those kids tend to take one of two paths. One, they either move to the back of the room and become totally silent in class. They rarely participate, and they will pretend to read during independent reading time, a period that most schools have where kids are supposed to read to themselves. Or, two, these children become behavior problems.

Whether they become silent or rambunctious, these kids then tend to tune out to what is happening in the classroom. Since much of what goes on in the classroom involves reading, they start performing poorly in other subjects too. Math word problems are, obviously, especially problematic.

Inevitably, the day will come when the teacher realizes the child is reading way below grade level. That usually happens in third grade. But teachers never say, “Hey, maybe there is something wrong with the way I am teaching,” because they do not know there may be something wrong with the way they are teaching. This is how they have been taught to teach, either in college or by the training they received through the school where they work, and they have faith in those institutions.

Instead, teachers will suspect that there is something wrong with the child and will generally suggest to the parents that they have their child evaluated for a learning disability. A child is labeled “learning disabled” if there is a discrepancy between his or her IQ and his level of performance on a task screened for by an evaluation conducted by an educational psychologist. In the case of competent students who have nothing wrong with them --- but who have not been taught how to sound out words and, so, cannot read words they have not been previously exposed to and memorized --- an evaluation will find a discrepancy between the child’s IQ (generally average to high) and the child’s reading ability (on the low side).

No surprise there, right? You have a smart kid who does not know how to read because no one ever taught him or her how to. But the horror of this story is that this discrepancy between a relatively high IQ and a low reading level will result, as I’ve said, in the child being labeled learning disabled, even though there is nothing neurologically wrong with him or her.

Q. Why don’t parents know children aren’t learning to read in school?

ID: Parents don’t know until it happens to their child. Then they will do a Google search and find that reading researchers know about it, speech pathologists know about it, and lots of other parents know about it. It’s like any other parenting problem such as miscarriage, or difficulty breastfeeding. You don’t know how common it is until it happens to you and you start looking for help.

A few years ago, spurred by an excellent APM podcast by Emily Hanford of APM, called “At a Loss for Words”, some teachers became aware of the problem. That podcast went viral and was the impetus for change, mainly because it reached teachers and they are the ones who matter because they are the ones with boots on the ground. If teachers are not onboard, change will not happen. They are getting onboard, and change is coming in many places.

Four states --- Indiana, Arkansas, Louisiana and Ohio --- have actually outlawed the three-cueing method of teaching reading. And according to Education Week, as of April 2024, 38 states and the District of Columbia have either passed laws or implemented new policies saying schools need to use reading curriculums that align with the Science of Reading --- research on what, and how, children need to be taught in order to learn to read well. The Science of Reading consists of five components --- phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension. Phonics is just one part of what kids need to master, but it is a critical part. Without knowing how to sound out words, kids can’t progress to becoming good readers.

Q. If change is happening in so many states is the problem solved?

ID: Far from it. As this article in EdWeek beautifully details, even though laws mandating effective reading instruction have been passed, change will be slow in happening. Even in states that have moved towards using evidence-based reading instruction, teachers need to be retrained, and there is pushback from many. New York City threw the Lucy Calkins Balanced Literacy curriculum out of half of its classrooms in September 2023 and is getting rid of it in the other half this month. And all schools have already been mandated to teach phonics. The fact that phonics is being taught in every classroom sounds wonderful. But, as the owner of a tutoring company in Manhattan, I see what is still going wrong.

Strangely, phonics is taught separately from reading. The kids come to us, and they know their phonics rules. Little first graders can tell you what an “r-controlled vowel” is. But they are still being sent home with little pattern books to read for homework chock-full of big words they can’t possibly read. They have to use the pictures to guess what the words are, and inevitably they guess wrong. There is still a large disconnect between teaching kids phonics and giving them enough systematic and explicit practice to master those rules. There is a huge need out there for decodable readers --- little stories that kids can sound out. They need much more practice doing that than they are currently getting.

Q. Why did Balanced Literacy hang on for so long if it wasn’t effective?

ID: The thought was that something was wrong with the child, not with the curriculum. That’s because children in higher socioeconomic neighborhoods appeared to be learning just fine with that curriculum. I say “appeared” because the proponents of this curriculum never asked what the parents were teaching the children at home. They were teaching their kids themselves, or having them tutored. It’s so important for people to know this that I’m going to say it again --- the parents of children in the “good” public schools in New York are very, very proactive at working with their children at home. This is the elephant in the room with the educational disparity between white and Asian children and Black and Latino children that no one ever talks about.

The proponents of Balanced Literacy also didn’t factor in how many of the kids in schools using this curriculum needed to go to after-school tutoring where they were taught to read by using phonics, or how many of those kids were referred to special education services, which also taught them phonics.

Also, Balanced Literacy did work for some percentage of kids. It is not a scripted curriculum and is handled differently by every teacher. Some teachers (usually more experienced ones) did more phonics than others. And there are kids who will learn to read simply by being read to. Their brains are wired for reading, and they pick it up very easily. However, in order to learn to read and spell well, most children need to be taught phonics explicitly and systematically.

Q. So how did you come to help kids?

ID: After the presentation in the library, a mother came up to me and said, “What you just described is exactly what’s happening to my daughter. She’s in first grade and has no idea how to read. Her school isn’t teaching her how to. They just send home books for her to read for homework, and she doesn’t know how to sound out a single word in those books. The other day, her teacher came up to me and said Ashley (not her real name) should be evaluated. The teacher said she was sure Ashley has ADD. I know Ashley doesn’t have ADD. If she did, I would want to get her all the help I could. But the only thing wrong is that her school isn’t teaching her how to read.”

That mother asked if I would work with her daughter over the summer.

I did. After just eight weeks, Ashley was reading beautifully. I felt like I had saved that child’s academic life. It was the most wonderful feeling in the world. The school stopped thinking there was something wrong with her, and the little girl fared beautifully.

I changed the focus of my studies (from clinical psychology to cognitive developmental) and did my dissertation on how children learn to read. Working with Ashley made me realize I didn’t want to spend my career fixing problems that never should have happened in the first place. I wanted to prevent those problems from happening.

Q. And have you?

ID: Over and over and over again. I cannot tell you how many kids need help learning how to read. And it isn’t just because of bad curriculums. I worked with a boy who attends a private school on the Upper East Side that does a phenomenal job teaching children how to read. Really first rate. But this boy had trouble because the teacher was moving too quickly for him.

Q. So I DIDN’T BELIEVE HIM and your workbooks are meant for parents whose kids are having trouble to read?

ID: Not only for those kids. Of course, I hope I DIDN’T BELIEVE HIM helps parents realize what may be going wrong for their child in school, or what may have already gone wrong. There are a lot of older struggling readers out there who can’t read big words because they never mastered phonics rules. Those kids need help! They do not need to continue struggling! So definitely, I want parents of struggling readers to use the workbooks. The workbooks will get every child up and running with the early stages of reading. But the workbooks are for anyone who wants to teach a child to read. The ideal situation is a mother or father who is looking for a fun activity to do with his or her child and chooses the teaching of reading as one of those activities. What a gift that parent is giving to the child and to their relationship. Every time the child picks up a book to read, that parent will know that he or she played a part in the child learning how to do so.

Q. But isn’t it the schools’ job to teach reading?

ID: Yes, but that often does not happen. And why not teach your child how to read if you enjoy doing it? I wouldn’t recommend that anyone who hates teaching their child to read attempt it. But if it is fun for you, why not do it? Parents who love to ski teach their kids to ski. They don’t hire ski instructors. I know I talked a lot about problems in schools. I wish those problems didn’t exist. I wish I didn’t have to talk about them. But I would be doing parents a disservice if I didn’t let them know what is happening in many schools. Those problems are what caused me to take this career path. But my workbooks are not about problems. They are about joy --- the joy of teaching a child how to read and knowing problems in that area will never touch your child. Imagine how wonderful the world would be --- and how our country’s reading scores would soar --- if every parent knew how easy it is to teach a child to read.

Q. What is the most important take-away message you want to give parents?

ID: Do not blindly trust your child’s school. Many schools in this country are doing a terrific job. If your child is learning, and flourishing, consider yourself tremendously lucky. But don’t just assume your child’s school is teaching effectively. As Time magazine reported, too many American parents are shockingly in the dark about their child’s actual academic performance.

Both of my sons attended two of the “best” public schools in New York City. You would be shocked, absolutely floored, at how proactive parents are at those schools. They do not leave the teaching of their children to the schools. They teach them how to read and do math, or they hire tutors to do so. As I’ve said before, that is the biggest unspoken secret in education. Parents are the ones who are making many of the “best” elementary schools in upscale neighborhoods seem good. As a teacher in the excellent Scarsdale, New York, school district once said, “If you want to find a good school, find a neighborhood that has the most mothers with Ph.D.s.” Those educated mothers will not blindly leave their child’s education to a school, no matter how good the school is.

This, of course, creates a vicious circle. Ineffective curriculums appear to be effective because the children at schools in affluent neighborhoods are doing well, so those curriculums are put into place in less affluent neighborhoods, because everyone wants to do what “good” schools are doing. Yet, many of the students at those “good” schools are doing well because their parents are often either teaching them at home, or having them tutored. Just look at the proliferation of various workbooks for parents at stores like Barnes & Noble, and at how tutoring is increasing in our country. Tutoring is one of the biggest growth sectors in our economy. In the 1960s, the advice for aspiring job applicants was “plastics.” Now it’s “tutoring.”

Q. Why is no one talking about this?

ID: Researchers, literacy advocates and informed parents have been talking about it for decades, going back to when WHY JOHNNY CAN’T READ was published in the 1950s. The Science of Reading is a phrase that is now being used to refer to a body of research that 24 YEARS AGO definitively identified the five pillars of effective reading instruction. TWENTY FOUR YEARS AGO!!! That is a long time for something to be known and ignored.

For decades, informed literacy advocates were ignored by politicians. Those politicians would close failing schools, or get rid of “bad” teachers. Many teachers in “bad” schools are excellent teachers. They are dealing with a classroom in which kids don’t come to school. Or fall asleep at their desks. Who have parents who don’t speak English, or didn’t graduate high school, so they can’t help them with homework.

Luckily, many parents and politicians have become aware of what children need to be taught in order to become good readers. Remote schooling during COVID played a large part in this. So did Emily Hanford’s most recent podcast, “Sold a Story”, which details how those ineffective curriculums managed to become the predominant way of teaching in our country. Many people ARE talking about teaching reading effectively, but I am shocked --- really absolutely floored --- at how many principals and teachers are still unaware of the science of reading. And, certainly, the majority of parents have never heard of it.

Q. You started out teaching children how to read. How did you come to be a full-service tutoring company?

ID: In the beginning, children came to learn how to read. They learned quickly and well. (It really is very easy to teach a child how to read. If you use effective methods from the beginning, children learn very rapidly.) The mother of one of my students said, “You did a great job teaching him how to read. I’d like him to keep coming for lessons. Teach him whatever you want.”

I worked with this child on math, then grammar, and then writing. He flourished, and other children began signing up for those lessons as well. They liked coming, and their parents were thrilled with how well they were doing in school because of their lessons with me, so they kept coming, year after year. We’ve worked with some kids from kindergarten all the way through 12th grade. It really is astonishing how tutoring has become the norm now. Kids go to school, and then they go to tutors to supplement what they are not being taught in school.

Q. Last question: As a tutor, why are you giving away the secrets of your reading curriculum in these workbooks?

ID: Because my goal was never to be the founder of a successful tutoring company. That is what ended up happening, but my goal was --- and still is --- to help children. ALL children. I am reaching only a tiny percentage of the children in New York with my tutoring. And not everyone in New York can afford private tutoring. Plus, there are many children in the rest of the country who need help learning how to read. I want to help those children. That’s why I wrote I DIDN’T BELIEVE HIM and the workbooks --- so that all parents will know how to teach a child to read and have the tools, laid out for them in a step-by-step sequential manner, to enable them to do so.

For more info, I highly recommend watching the video, How to teach a child to read, on my website’s main page.