From Silence to Sound: Eight Years of Asking the Same Question

 

                “From Cueing to Confusion: The Flaw We’re Still Ignoring”

It’s been over a year since I last wandered the digital corridors of Substack. Life, as it tends to do, pulled me in a thousand directions—teaching, writing, advocating, challenging. But yesterday, on October 10th, 2025, a familiar ping lit up my inbox. A newsletter. Simple. Unassuming. From a writer I’d followed loosely in the past. The subject line was just provocative enough to override my usual inbox triage. I clicked.

There it was: Holly Korbey’s latest post, dated September 9, 2025. The title? “Disappointed but not surprised on NAEP math scores.” I wasn’t drawn in by the math. What caught me was the opening—a vivid callback to a conversation that still echoes through education circles like a stubborn refrain.

 

Last year, I interviewed Emily Hanford for Edutopia. My first question to her was something like, “You found there’s a problem with how children are learning to read…” She stopped me cold. “No,” she corrected, “I found a problem with how children are being taught to read.” That distinction landed like a gut punch. It wasn’t about the kids. It was about the adults. The system. The method.

 

Hanford—whose 2018 APM Reports piece Hard Words and 2022 podcast series Sold a Story ignited a firestorm in literacy education—had peeled back the curtain on decades of misguided instruction. Millions of American children, shortchanged. But as I read Korbey’s reflection, a familiar question resurfaced. One that’s haunted me for years: What exactly is that “major flaw”? And after eight years of Hanford’s dogged reporting—beginning with her 2017 deep dives into dyslexia and ballooning into a national movement—has it been fixed? Or are we still pouring good money after bad, watching another generation stumble over the same invisible hurdles?

 

I fired off a comment to Korbey, echoing Hanford’s own reframing: What’s the core flaw in how we’re teaching kids to read? Her post didn’t spell it out. But it reignited my own decade-long fixation. Back in 2017, I emailed Hanford and her team at American Public Media (APM), pleading for a deeper look at the systemic failures. My exchanges with her—preserved in a 2020 blog post on my site, Dyslexia Friend—reveal a frustration that’s only grown sharper with time. Why, in a field brimming with passion for literacy, does the conversation feel so siloed?

 

Let me take you back—and forward—through this tangled tale. Because if we’re going to honor Korbey’s nudge and Hanford’s legacy, we owe it to the kids still waiting for answers.

 

In Emily’s Edutopia interview with Korbey (titled “How a Podcast Toppled the Reading Instruction Canon”), she zeroes in on the “three-cueing” system—a darling of “balanced literacy” programs popularized in the 1990s and 2000s. It’s a system that encouraged guessing over decoding, context over clarity. But here’s the wrinkle: millions of kids read exceedingly well during the balanced literacy era. So is balanced literacy the culprit?

 

Hanford traces the problem back to the 1960s, citing research that proves explicit, systematic phonics is non-negotiable for fluent reading. Without it, words don’t “stick” in long-term memory via orthographic mapping—they evaporate. But if that’s true, how do we explain the millions of kids who became excellent readers during the whole-language period?

 

That’s where my own correspondence comes in—a cry in the wilderness, stretching from 2017 to the present.

 

Flashback to September 2017. APM Reports drops How American Schools Fail Kids with Dyslexia, a bombshell revealing that up to 20% of kids were being misidentified or underserved. I was incensed—not just by the numbers, but by what felt like half the story. As an educator who’d seen these struggles firsthand, I fired off my first email to APM:

 

“I don't agree with there being 10 to 20% of kids who are dyslexic. This is a fallacy. Any and every kid who can't read is lumped under the umbrella term 'dyslexia.' [LINK] A majority of the kids classified as dyslexic are in fact shut-down or disengaged kids. They shut down or disengage because they have been taught wrongly.”

 

Hanford replied graciously:

 

“Michel, Thanks for writing. Yes, you raise many relevant and important points. Unfortunately, there are no satisfying answers as to why the research is being ignored.”

 

We exchanged a few more notes—me nudging on the “wrongly taught” bit, her promising to keep reporting. By 2019, I was emailing again:

 

“The sounds represented by letters are taught wrongly.”

 

Her response?

 

“These are good points and we are continuing to report.”

 

That “continuing” has yielded gold. Sold a Story dismantled cueing, pushed phonics mandates, and even forced Lucy Calkins to revise her program. But why no deeper dive into how sounds are taught wrongly? Why the radio silence on disengagement as a shutdown response to confusion?

 

In my view, it’s not just cueing. It’s the insidious habit of adding extraneous sounds to consonants—think /buh/ instead of /b/—that trips kids into phonemic confusion from day one. This, I argue in posts like The Solution to Poor Reading Scores Is... (Parts 1 and Part 2), creates “instructional casualties”—kids who zone out, labelled dyslexic, when explicit, mismatch-free teaching could unlock them.

 

Fast-forward to 2024. My Behind & Beyond Sold a Story series (Parts 3 and Parts 4) lays it bare: Hanford’s right that word reading is foundational, but calling it “relatively easy” ignores the 30% of global kids still decoding in K–3. Singapore clocks dyslexia at 3.5% to 10%. Why not us?

 

Hanford’s passion is real. She’s changed laws in 26 states since 2022 alone. But passion without dialogue? That’s the real flaw. Why not collaborate on shutdown prevention?

 

Eight Years On: Progress, Pushback, and the NAEP Wake-Up Call

So, has the flaw been rectified? Not yet.

 

NAEP 2024 tells a sobering story: fourth-grade reading scores flatlined post-pandemic. We’ve mandated phonics, yes. But have we purified the sounds? Have we addressed the confusion that causes shutdown?

 

A Call to Bridge the Gap: From Shutdown to Showdown

Holly Korbey’s post isn’t just nostalgia—it’s a mirror. It reminds us that flaws in teaching aren’t isolated. They compound across subjects, eroding trust in schools. My unanswered emails to Hanford? They’re symptomatic of a field too wedded to paradigms. Phonics works, but only if sounds are pure—no /buh/, no guesswork. Rote learning of high-frequency words must walk hand-in-hand with decoding.

 

If you’re a teacher, parent, or policymaker: read Shut Down Kids? for the disengagement playbook. Grab Teach Your Child to Read for QR-coded sound models. And Emily? Holly? Let’s talk. Eight years is too long for silos.

 

Let’s move from echo chambers to collaboration. From confusion to clarity. From shutdown to breakthrough.