Why Your Child's School Switched Reading Curricula (and Why It May Not be Enough)

Lisa Murphy, M. Ed.
Apr 10
5 min read

Pine State Learning | Literacy & Schools

Over the past several years, schools across Maine have been making significant changes to how they teach reading. Districts have adopted new curricula, retired leveled readers, and moved away from approaches that dominated classrooms for decades. If your child's school made one of these shifts, you may have received a letter home, attended a curriculum night, or simply noticed new materials in your child's backpack.

This is genuinely good news. The research supporting these changes is strong, and the shift is long overdue. But a new curriculum is a tool. Like any tool, its effectiveness depends on the knowledge and training of the person using it. And in Maine, the gap between new materials and the underlying teacher preparation to use them well is significant.

What Came Before: Balanced Literacy

For most of the past thirty years, American reading instruction was built on a framework called balanced literacy. The approach emphasized meaning-making over decoding: children were taught to use context clues, pictures, and sentence structure to figure out unfamiliar words, a strategy known as three-cueing. Reading was organized around leveled texts, with children matched to books at their independent reading level. The underlying premise was that reading, like speaking, develops naturally when children are immersed in meaningful text.

This approach was not without genuine value. It produced strong readers in children who arrived at school with well-developed phonological skills and broad vocabulary. For those children, immersion in text worked.

For children who needed explicit instruction in how print maps to sound, it did not work. Research accumulated over decades consistently showed that a substantial portion of children, including many who would never be identified as having a learning disability, require direct and systematic phonics instruction in order to become fluent readers. Balanced literacy did not provide that. The gap between children who read easily and children who struggled grew, and it grew predictably, along lines that explicit instruction could have addressed.

The accumulated weight of that research is what finally shifted policy. In October 2025, the Maine Department of Education announced plans to strengthen evidence-based instruction across the state, explicitly naming the science of reading as the framework for literacy.

The Curriculum Switch

Schools throughout Maine are now adopting structured literacy-aligned curricula. These programs sequence phonics instruction explicitly, use decodable texts that allow children to practice the specific patterns they've been taught, and reduce reliance on context-based guessing strategies. The shift represents a meaningful change in what gets handed to children and how reading instruction is structured on paper.

The problem is that a curriculum does not teach. A teacher teaches.

Structured literacy is not simply a different set of materials. It reflects a specific body of knowledge about how language works, how children acquire reading, and how to diagnose and respond to difficulty. Teaching it well requires understanding phonological awareness, orthographic mapping, the structure of English morphology, and how to assess where a specific child's skills are breaking down. A teacher who was trained in balanced literacy and has taught that way for ten or fifteen years is not automatically equipped to implement a structured literacy curriculum with fidelity simply because the textbooks changed.

This is not a criticism of teachers. It is a description of a training gap that is the responsibility of teacher preparation programs and school systems, not individual educators.

The Training Gap in Maine

The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) evaluates teacher preparation programs across the country on their coverage of the five pillars of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. In its most recent review, Maine's three largest public teacher preparation programs, at the University of Maine at Orono, the University of Southern Maine, and the University of Maine at Farmington, all received failing grades. The University of Southern Maine and the University of Maine at Farmington adequately addressed zero of the five pillars. The University of Maine at Orono addressed one: comprehension.

The universities have disputed NCTQ's methodology, arguing that a review of course syllabi does not capture the full scope of what their programs teach. That debate is worth following. What is harder to dispute is the outcome: a generation of Maine teachers who entered the classroom without deep preparation in structured literacy, and who are now being asked to implement curricula that depend on exactly that preparation.

That means the majority of teachers currently in Maine classrooms, including many who are now being asked to implement new structured literacy curricula, were trained in programs that did not adequately prepare them for this work. They are being asked to teach in a new way using knowledge they were never fully given.

What this looks like in practice: a teacher using a structured literacy curriculum who defaults, under pressure, to familiar strategies. Decodable words treated as sight words. Context clues still encouraged when a child gets stuck. Books sent home for independent reading that are well above the child's current decoding level. The materials are new. The instruction is not.

None of this is the teacher's fault. It is a structural problem, and it has a structural solution.

What Can Actually Help

Teachers who receive deep, sustained training in the science of reading become significantly more effective at teaching all of their students to read, particularly those who need explicit instruction most. LETRS (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling), developed by Dr. Louisa Moats, is one of the most comprehensive professional development programs available for this purpose. It is not a quick workshop. It is a substantive two-volume course covering phonemic awareness, phonics, morphology, spelling, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing, delivered over time and designed to build genuine expertise rather than surface familiarity.

The Maine DOE has also expanded access to literacy professional development through programs like AIM Pathways and Keys to Literacy. In the summer of 2024, nearly 650 Maine educators completed more than 20,000 hours of professional learning grounded in the science of reading through AIM Institute's Steps to Literacy modules.

Several Maine districts have begun investing in this training. Where it has been implemented well, the results are consistent: better outcomes, more confident teachers, and fewer children falling through the cracks of a system that now has better materials but needs more fully trained practitioners.

The curriculum switch was a brave and necessary step. Backing it up with the investment teachers need is the next one.

What Parents Can Look For

If your child's school has adopted a new reading curriculum, a few observable signs can indicate whether it is being implemented with the underlying knowledge it requires.

A teacher with strong structured literacy training will respond to a child's reading error by analyzing it: what exactly did the child do, and what does that suggest about what they haven't yet mastered? They will send home decodable books, not leveled texts, for early readers. They will be able to explain what phonemic awareness is and how it connects to phonics instruction. And they will not tell a struggling reader to look at the picture for a clue.

If you have questions about how reading is being taught in your child's classroom, those are worth asking. Teachers who have received good training are generally glad to explain their approach. And the answer will tell you a great deal about what your child is experiencing at the front of the room every day.

Sources:

If your child has been through reading instruction that didn't produce the progress you expected, and you're not sure why, read: Learning Map: What Our Pretest Measures