I will always remember the time a 14-year-old struggling reader I was working with at Camden Hills Regional High School exclaimed, “Why didn’t anyone tell me this before?!” as he realized there were rules he could use to decode words. It was a question I had been asking for years.

Scientific research on how children learn to read has been available for at least 30 years, yet the Maine Dept. of Education and Maine universities have continued to promote instructional programs and materials, such as Fountas & Pinnell’s ‘leveled literacy readers’, that evolved out of the now debunked Whole Language philosophy.

Introduced to Maine educators in the mid 1980s by founder Kenneth Goodman, that theory falsely claimed children learn to read as naturally as they learn to speak when exposed to meaningful text. The Science of Reading has shown just the opposite: Children become proficient readers through explicit instruction of specific skills. 

Having worked for 10 years as a special education consultant in schools throughout the Midcoast I saw the price individual students paid — resulting in frustrated teachers, unnecessary special education referrals, and very high rates of special education identification, as well as students who, by third grade, felt like failures.

 I recall one fourth grader who coped by carrying around a chapter book he couldn’t read so he’d look like his classmates (he later dropped out of high school).

At another school a second grader eager to prove to me that he could read proceeded to orally recite from memory one of the leveled story books, which he did perfectly except he couldn’t actually read any of the words on the pages. Classroom teachers recognized their struggling readers and wanted to help, but hadn’t been provided with the strategies or instructional tools they needed. 

Those of us in special education who followed the research and attended out-of-state conferences advocated for change with school administrators and those in charge of Title 1 programs to no avail. 

And despite the wealth of research available beginning in the late 1990s from leading universities, the NICHD, and the National Reading Panel, the Maine Department of Education took no initiative to share this information with their educators, even as other states were already abandoning the use of Whole Language methods.

And as the PenBay Pilot's January 6, 2026 reprint of Maine Teacher Prep Programs Call Foul After Getting F’s for How They Teach Reading suggests Maine universities are still not fulfilling their responsibility to adequately prepare future teachers of reading.

While my biggest disappointment is that I never succeeded in influencing how reading was being taught, it gives me great satisfaction today that my daughter is part of a team revamping NYC’s reading curriculum to align with the Science of Reading under an administration and superintendent that believe “reading is a basic right” and have set goals and deadlines for implementation, as well as provided classroom teachers with the support and training necessary for success.

Maine needs school leaders willing to take such decisive action.

Admittedly, it has been several years since I was in a Midcoast classroom. I can only hope that since then schools have discarded their Whole Language practices and materials and fully committed to research-based reading instruction so no teenager in the future has to ask why he wasn’t taught word decoding skills. 

References/resources for parents & teachers 

Moravec, Kristian. January 11, 2026. Maine teacher prep programs call foul after getting F’s for how they teach reading.  https://themainemonitor.org/education/  

Moats, Louisa. Summer 2020.  Teaching Reading is Rocket Science ..  

Hanford, Emily. Fall 2022. Podcast. Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong 

Judi Schelble lives in Camden and is a retired special ed teacher/special ed consultant