Recently, Show-Me Institute analysts have been sounding the alarm on Missouri’s literacy crisis. The data are sobering—42 percent of our state’s fourth graders can barely read, representing some of the worst results we have seen in two decades. When a child reaches the end of third grade without the ability to decode text, they do not just fall behind. They are essentially locked out of the rest of the curriculum.
Some rural Missouri students, fortunately, are beginning to make breakthroughs with help from The New Teacher’s Project (TNTP) and its Rural Schools Early Literacy Collaborative. This program helps educators move away from the discredited balanced literacy models of the past and encourages them to embrace the science of reading. This signals a return to proven, evidence-based instruction that prioritizes how the human brain actually learns to process language.
For too long, Missouri classrooms have relied on the three-cueing system, which is a method that encouraged students to guess words based on pictures or context rather than sounding them out. As Institute analysts have argued repeatedly, reading is not a natural skill like speaking; it must be explicitly taught. Focusing on phonemic awareness helps students identify individual sounds and connect them to written letters, building the accuracy and speed necessary to make sense of the text as a whole.
While it is heartening to see individual districts taking the lead, Missouri’s recovery requires systemic policy changes. We need essential reforms to ensure this new approach becomes the standard rather than the exception. First, we need universal screening to identify struggling readers in the earliest grades so no child slips through the cracks. Second, we must address accountability in teacher preparation. Currently, too many Missouri universities fail to train new teachers in evidence-based methods, and we must ensure our educators enter the classroom equipped with tools that work. Finally, we must make sure that students who are far behind in reading skills are not promoted to fourth grade.
If we fail to get the foundation right in the early years, we are setting our students up for a lifetime of struggle. The TNTP program is just one example of how we can prioritize research over rhetoric and turn the tide on literacy.
