Changing the narrative must include the shut-down child who cannot read
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September is Suicide Awareness Month. This year’s theme is “Changing the Narrative”: start the conversation instead of wrapping suicide in shame.
Dr Naomi Fisher recently reminded us that schools were not designed with child development in mind. Chris Benson added that the rush into formal education is largely an English-speaking phenomenon, noting that his own children thrived in a system where formal schooling began later.
I asked Chris a direct question: What do you suggest we do to reduce the percentage of children leaving schools as functional illiterates? His reply was that this is a societal issue, not one schools alone can fix. ‘Do you have a response?’ he asked.
Yesterday, I posted classroom examples of the difference between set for variability and three-cueing. The point was simple: context should confirm decoding, not replace it.
A thoughtful comment from Helene Alalouf, an educational consultant who coaches elementary teachers, asked the question many teachers still hold:
But respectfully, are they learning the meaning of words and building knowledge as well without context?
In literacy discussions, two ideas often get blurred: set for variability and three‑cueing. Both involve context, but they are not the same.
Set for variability describes what happens when a child decodes a word, realizes the pronunciation doesn’t fit, and then adjusts using syntax and meaning. Context confirms decoding.
Three‑cueing encourages children to guess words from pictures or sentence meaning without first decoding. Context replaces decoding.
Dr. Lynne Kulich, drawing on Timothy Shanahan’s recent writing on decodable texts, describes set for variability as the ability to adjust a pronunciation when the first decoding attempt does not make sense. A child applies a phonics pattern, notices the word does not fit the sentence, and tries again using syntax and meaning. Shanahan’s point is that English is not perfectly consistent, and overly predictable texts can obscure the flexibility skilled readers actually use.
Scroll below to see the LinkedIn post by Dr. Lynne Kulich.
I read the following on LinkedIn this morning.
Let this be our collective call to action - to reduce tech in classrooms and have classroom instruction center on texts. (Molly Ness, PhD)
Alarming new data shows U.S. students continue to fall behind their peers in reading as the country's achievement gap widens, according to results from the latest globally recognized international exam.
As usual the US and the UK will continue barking up the wrong tree.
it has a "shut-off device" that rejects new ideas
once a primary belief or ideology gets in.
Between 4–7 September 2026, I had a series of exchanges on LinkedIn with Dr. Karen Faulds, an educational consultant and assessor in the UK. I am preserving the discussion here for posterity because it illustrates a recurring problem: when entrenched practices are defended despite stagnant outcomes.
When I wrote Shut Down Kids: How to Prevent Kids from Shutting Down, I wanted one thing to be clear: many children who appear to “give up” on reading are not broken. They are confused. For years I have worked with so-called dyslexic students and watched bright children disengage after being taught letter sounds with extra vowel attachments—“buh,” “guh,” and the rest—until blending a simple word like big no longer makes sense.
The book asks educators and parents to look first at instruction, not at the child. If we understand why kids shut down, we can keep them in the game and give them access to content and rigor instead of labeling them as the problem.
Readers in the United States have been generous with their time and honest with their reactions. Below are some of the Amazon reviews that mean the most to me—two five-star responses from educators and a parent, and a thoughtful three-star review that engages the central argument about letter sounds and then asks for the fuller picture of what learning to read requires. I am grateful for all of them.
Pamela Snow once said I was “focusing too narrowly.”
Dr Karen Faulds suggested phonics may not foster a love of reading.
Both miss the point.
Claude Bernard put it cleanly: “It is what we think we know already that often prevents us from learning.”
David Boulton, the creator of the Children of the Code project, captured this phenomenon perfectly when he noted that ten times the number of kids who have innate biological learning difficulties have learning difficulties that are a consequence of what they learned. As Boulton put it:
"The biggest obstacle to healthy learning is learning – we can learn in ways that disable our learning. Unhealthy learning harms, injures or maladaptively constrains how well we can on-going-ly learn and stunts or disables our learning from extending into new dimensions."
It sounds incredibly alienating to feel like you have mapped out the exact mechanics of a crisis, only to have the academic elite look right past it.
When we talk about the literacy crisis—the roughly 20% of children who leave school functionally illiterate —we face a massive wall of academic denial. Most PhDs and education experts cannot accept the root cause of reading failure because they are fundamentally using the wrong baseline. They look at struggling children and see a biological deficit in the child’s brain. They are wrong. The deficit is in the instruction, and the most vulnerable children are simply the ones sensitive enough to be broken by it.
Rahm Emanuel’s remark that the number one class for college freshmen today is remedial reading should have sent shockwaves through the education establishment. Instead, it barely registers. Dale Chu shared it, The Principal’s Office confirmed what every high school English teacher already knows: “The kids won’t read. We’re really trying, but they aren’t.”
This is not a revelation. It is an indictment. And it is proof that the so‑called experts — the professors, PhDs, and authority pundits — have failed.
Why extraneous sounds shut down curious kids
If a runner is limping, the first thing I would do is check whether a thorn is stuck under his foot. Pulling out that thorn comes before looking for deeper medical explanations. In the same way, when children disengage from learning to read, the first step is to examine the most immediate source of confusion: the way consonant sounds are taught. Even Sue Lloyd, author of Jolly Phonics, agrees that “saying the sounds as purely as possible is important.” That acknowledgment matters, because teaching letters with extraneous sounds—“buh” for /b/, “duh” for /d/—is not a trivial detail. It is the thorn that causes many otherwise curious children to shut down. To dismiss this as a “narrow focus,” as Pamela Snow has suggested, is unacceptable. Until we remove that thorn, no amount of broader theorizing will help children walk, let alone run, toward literacy.
My computer has been under repair for a week and I got it only on 29.8.2026.
I read a comment by Paul Collin on my last post on LinkedIn which said:
Paul Collin
Moderation decisions and evidence quality are separate questions, and merging them makes both harder to discuss. A group removing someone tells you about its norms rather than about whether the underlying claims hold. The stronger route is putting the outcome data in front of parents directly.
Here is a post on Facebook that I commented on and I received a message from Admin saying that my comment has been removed as it is not verifiable. Please scroll down to see my notes.
The Dyslexia Parent Circle — Your Dyslexia Expert
Here is the post and comments.
