Teaching kids to read: NC's teacher colleges are turning around low marks, report finds

North Carolina's teachers' colleges are doing a much better job of preparing educators for reading instruction, just a few years after getting dismal marks for failing to align with research on how people learn to read, a new report has found.

Nationally, teachers' colleges are getting better marks, too, but not at the rate North Carolina's are, the new analysis found.

The improvement for teachers' colleges is just one of many components needed to turn the state's and the nation's fortunes around after years of declining reading scores, though it represents one of the most important first steps: Ensuring the people tasked with teaching children how to read know how best to do it.

"Too many children just still aren't learning to read, and reading outcomes won't improve unless teacher preparation programs improve," Heather Penske, NCTQ's president, told WRAL News. "So unless we get better at teaching teachers to teach reading aligned to the science, we're not going to see student outcomes improve."

For decades, teachers in North Carolina and across the country were using discredited methods to instruct children how to read, in part because a disconnect among cognitive science scholars, teachers' colleges, textbook providers and schools. Those discredited methods included the "three-cueing" method, which teaches people to use context clues to guess an unfamiliar word when they come across it, rather than reading the letters in the word. Three-cueing has been discredited for often leading to wrong answers and for bypassing the process of recognizing letters and corresponding sounds.

In the past five years, North Carolina and many other states have prohibited three-cueing and required teachers to learn the cognitive research behind language learning and to teach reading by using five focus areas: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. The so-called "Science of Reading" emphasizes explicit instruction on all areas because research has found that reading is not a natural process and must be taught.

Overhauling reading instruction has taken years to do, and North Carolina's education leaders have said seeing positive results from it will take time, too.

The National Council on Teacher Quality gave high marks to nearly all of the state's public teachers' colleges and to many of its private teachers' colleges.

The group rates the state fairly well, compared to the rest of the country. It found one in every five teachers' colleges nationwide still teaches discredited reading instruction methods and fails to provide opportunities for prospective teachers to practice any of the five methods supported by research. About half of teachers' colleges failed to adequately instruct on at least one of the five methods.

That's all concerning because less than half of students nationally are reading proficiently, Penske said.

"It's malpractice to send people into classrooms... to teach children who do not know how to teach reading effectively," Penske said.

In North Carolina, only two of the 29 teachers' colleges that submitted data to NCTQ scored below an "A": Wingate University (an "F") and the University of North Carolina at Wilmington's graduate program (a "C," while its undergraduate program scored an "A+.") Wingate University has a small teacher preparation program, at just 66 students in 2025, per North Carolina Department of Public Instruction data.

Nine private colleges with teacher preparation programs didn't provide data at NCTQ's request.

North Carolina, like most other states, didn't receive high marks on more specialized reading instruction, however.

Just a third of North Carolina's teachers' colleges spend two or more hours instructing prospective teachers on supporting English learners. Just about a third of the state's teachers' colleges spend two or more hours instruction prospective teachers on working with struggling readers. Those include children with dyslexia.

But North Carolina teachers are still required to work with kids who have reading struggles. The state conducts literacy screeners that can identify students who may be at risk for reading difficulties, for whom they can then can develop an Individual Reading Plan. Tens of thousands of North Carolina students have special education plans for learning disabilities and may often spend significant time in a general education classroom.

Prospective teachers need more time learning how to work with struggling readers to succeed at helping them, Penske said.

"If teachers have the knowledge and skills aligned to the best scientific evidence of how to teach reading, they can teach 95% of students to read," Penske said. "That is hundreds of thousands of kids across our nation, and thousands of kids in North Carolina alone."

But North Carolina's relative success is only a start.

When the public can expect reading scores to go up is a different story, and what schools are doing to help has been affected by recent local budget cuts.

North Carolina's existing teaching corps only completed training on the Science of Reading research and methods in 2024, and new teachers are often still taking it.

Most of the state's public teachers colleges were not aligned with the Science of Reading in late 2022 but were all in compliance by the fall of 2024, according a University of North Carolina System spokesperson. The System is still working on improvements, though, by starting a group for early literacy faculty to stay on top of the latest research. The System also held a literacy summit for its teachers' colleges, in which faculty heard from leading cognitive researchers.

North Carolina Department of Public Instruction leaders believe the state's earliest learners have benefitted so far from the training, though many of them don't take standardized tests that would reflect that progress. Reading performance on standardized tests improve last year, for the third year in a row since the Covid-19 pandemic, though the share of students testing proficiently remains below what it was before the pandemic.

The state remains focused on strengthening teaching methods, teacher support and consistent implementation of research-backed teaching methods, DPI told WRAL News. It's all in an effort to keep increasing literacy across the state.

In 2022, North Carolina created 123 literacy coaches to serve all 115 school districts and the state's eight geographic regions, and six literacy facilitators who provide professional development and support.

A literacy coach is someone who helps teachers improve their literacy instruction through observation and data review and can at time work directly with children themselves.

Some school districts already had such specialists, including Wake County.

Numerous school systems used temporary federal pandemic stimulus dollars to create temporary literacy coach positions, though that funding was largely exhausted by October 2024.

Since then, even Wake County plans to further cut some literacy coach positions because of increased operating costs and stagnant revenue. Because Wake's literacy coaches are optional and locally funded, they became subject to restructuring. Next school year, the district only plans to have coaches at its highest-need schools.