In Part 1, I wrote that people aren’t struggling because they don’t care. They’re struggling because no one aligned the path for them. That’s true in education too—especially in literacy.
For over a decade, I’ve pointed to what I believe is the “Holy Grail” of literacy reform: the actual cause of why so many children leave school as functional illiterates. It’s not hidden. It’s not complicated. It’s not a mystery.
It’s misaligned instruction.
When children are taught the wrong sounds of letters, most—around four out of five—become confused. They wonder why buh-ah-tuh is supposed to form bat, or cuh-ah-tuh is supposed to form cat. About three in five eventually figure it out between grades 4 and 6. But one in five—often the most curious and intelligent—shut down. They disengage, and they leave school unable to read. Not because they’re incapable, but because the instruction itself betrayed them.
This is why we are missing the Edisons, the Tom Cruises, and the other unconventional talents of yesteryears. When curiosity is punished by confusion, brilliance is lost before it has a chance to shine.
These children are labeled dyslexic or slow, when the real issue is instructional confusion. Siegfried Engelmann named it “dysteachia”—teaching gone wrong. Yet many educators and researchers dismiss this, because they themselves were among the majority who managed to decode despite being taught with extraneous sounds.
The Grail Is Clarity
I’ve seen it firsthand. When children are taught with clear, correct letter sounds—step by step, with phonics that show how sounds map to letters and how words are built—they thrive. No child shuts down. They don’t need labels. They don’t need expensive programs. They need clarity.
This is the Grail. And I’ve been shouting it from the rooftops since 2010.
The Foundation Is Decoding
Educators often emphasize vocabulary, comprehension, and morphology. These are all essential skills—but they come later. The true foundation of literacy is decoding. A child must first learn to walk before they can run or jump. If decoding is shaky, higher-level skills cannot take root.
When a child shuts down at the decoding stage, no amount of vocabulary drills or comprehension exercises will help. This is why many children who only figure out how to read in grades 4–6 struggle in higher grades: they missed the foundation, and the gap follows them. Without decoding, the rest of literacy instruction is like building a house on sand.
But the Noise Is Louder
Despite the evidence, the noise continues:
Commercial programs promising miracles
Theories that complicate what should be simple
Labels that shift blame from instruction to the child
Institutions that protect reputations instead of children
The result? A generation of students who leave school unable to read confidently. Not because they’re incapable—but because the system refused to listen.
The Grail Was Never Lost
The tragedy is not that the Grail was lost. It’s that it was found—and ignored. Functional illiteracy is not a puzzle waiting to be solved. It’s a consequence of systemic misalignment, repeated across classrooms, districts, and countries.
And the cost of being right too early is measured not in debates, but in the lives of children who left school unable to read.
In the next part of this series, I’ll explore why even correct teaching sometimes fails—how early confusion and misplaced debates over simple words keep children from thriving, and why clarity must include both decoding and usable language from the start.
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