Jenny Kier watched her son Hunter breeze through math while falling further behind in reading every year, the pattern that sends thousands of families toward an evaluation and a label. Her family’s turning point was not a diagnosis. It was a structured literacy program, twenty minutes a day, four days a week, that brought Hunter to grade-level reading in eight months. This week Kier published her conclusion in eSchool News: her son was never dyslexic, he was never properly taught to read. Her story lands on the question decades of reading science keep putting to schools, and it is the question to ask first: before anyone names what is wrong with a struggling reader, examine what that reader was taught.
A mother’s essay in eSchool News argues her son was headed for a dyslexia label when the true problem was reading instruction that never taught him the code. Here is her story, the science that supports the sharper question underneath it, and the order in which parents should ask it.
Common questions
How do I know if my child has dyslexia or was never taught to read properly?
What is three-cueing, and why have so many states restricted it?
My child is in middle school. Is it too late to catch up in reading?
What should I ask my child’s school about reading instruction?
Her son was headed for a dyslexia label. Structured literacy brought him to grade level in eight months. The first question is not what is wrong with the child. It is what the child was taught.
A Math Ferrari, a Stalled Reader, and an Eight-Month Turnaround
Kier’s essay, published July 23 in eSchool News, traces a familiar arc. Hunter’s reading comprehension difficulties surfaced in fifth grade. By sixth grade the decoding gaps had widened, even as his math kept accelerating. Literacy expert Paul Black assessed him and gave the boy a picture of his own mind: “Your math brain is a Ferrari. You can see things before they’re even built. Your reading brain is more like a Honda Civic.” The intervention that followed was not exotic. Hunter worked through a structured literacy program, twenty minutes a day, Monday through Thursday, learning the sound-to-letter code nobody had explicitly taught him.
Within eight months he read and comprehended at grade level. He is now 16, graduating high school early with honors, accepted to Texas A&M for engineering. Kier’s argument from that experience is pointed: many intelligent struggling readers are missing foundational skills because instruction never delivered them, and structured literacy should be how schools teach every child, not a remedy unlocked by a diagnosis. “Children deserve explicit instruction in phonics, decoding, and language structure before frustration becomes identity,” she writes.
She anchors the stakes in the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress: 31 percent of U.S. fourth graders read at or above the Proficient level, while 40 percent scored below Basic, and eighth graders posted the largest below-Basic share in the assessment’s 32-year history. One disclosure belongs on the table, and Kier’s byline carries it: she is an account executive at Reading Horizons, a company that sells structured literacy curriculum. Her essay is a personal account, not a study. The science it points to, though, stands on its own.
“Children deserve explicit instruction in phonics, decoding, and language structure before frustration becomes identity.” Jenny Kier, parent and account executive at Reading Horizons, writing in eSchool News
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
The Science Stopped Blaming the Child a Long Time Ago
Children soak up spoken language by being around it. Reading is different: it is a roughly 5,000-year-old cultural invention the brain never evolved for, which is why researchers from David Geary to Stanislas Dehaene to Maryanne Wolf converge on the same conclusion the National Reading Panel reached in 2000. There is no reading instinct to fall back on, so the code has to be explicitly, systematically taught, for every reader who ever lived. A child who was never taught that code and struggles is not displaying a disorder. He is displaying the predictable result.
The instruction many classrooms delivered instead trained the wrong habits on purpose. Decades of eye-tracking research by Keith Rayner show that skilled readers process nearly every letter on the page and lean harder on letter-sound information as they improve, while guessing from pictures and context is the signature of struggling readers. Cognitive scientist Mark Seidenberg calls the three-cueing approach “descriptive of how poor readers read.” Yet as recently as 2019, three-quarters of K-2 teachers told the EdWeek Research Center they used it. It took Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story investigation to force the issue, and the correction is still in progress: at least 26 states have passed reading-instruction laws since 2022, and at least 15 have restricted cueing, per APM Reports. Minnesota Sen. Zach Duckworth captured the absurdity: “When I say to people, ‘We need to teach our kids to sound out words,’ they look at me like, ‘Well, of course, isn’t that what we’re doing?'”
None of this means dyslexia is invented. The International Dyslexia Association’s 2025 definition describes a real, brain-based difficulty mapping the sounds of language onto print, occurring across all intelligence levels, often traveling with working memory and processing speed differences. Two things are true at once: guessing-based instruction manufactured struggling readers at scale, and some children need more than a curriculum fix. Structured literacy is the evidence-backed first move for both groups, and phonics, while necessary, was never the whole answer for every child. To understand how reading difficulties develop and respond to the right practice, see our complete guide to dyslexia and reading differences.
Key takeaways
- Instruction before label: Hunter reached grade-level reading in eight months once explicit teaching replaced guessing.
- Guessing was mainstream: In 2019, three-quarters of K-2 teachers reported using the three-cueing approach.
- Both things are true: Poor instruction manufactures struggling readers, and real phonological differences still exist.
The Questions That Sort It Out, in Order
Ask the instruction question first. What is the core reading program at your school, and does it teach decoding explicitly and in sequence? Listen for the red flags of guessing-based teaching: “look at the picture,” “skip it and come back,” “what would make sense here?” Then ask what changes on the Monday after a below-benchmark score. A district serious about reading answers with a specific, explicit intervention and progress data families get to see. A watch list is not an answer.
Then watch how your child responds to genuinely explicit teaching. Hunter’s eight-month turnaround is what an instruction gap looks like when it closes. Months of strong, structured instruction with flat progress is a different signal, and a valuable one: that is the moment to pursue a professional evaluation, both to open the door to formal supports and to look at the fuller picture of systems reading draws on, from language to working memory to processing speed. Neither path wastes time, because the same explicit teaching serves both.
The deadline that matters is not academic. It is identity. Kier’s sharpest line is about frustration hardening into a story a child tells about himself, and the research on identity-based motivation backs her: “I’m bad at reading” operates as a prediction children act on, and every session either confirms it or rewrites it. Hunter started catching up in sixth grade, and brain-imaging research by Sally Shaywitz at Yale and Elise Temple at Stanford shows why that worked: readers who struggle develop the same reading pathways as typical readers after intensive, appropriate intervention. The label question has time. The instruction question does not.
“Your math brain is a Ferrari. You can see things before they’re even built. Your reading brain is more like a Honda Civic.” Paul Black, literacy expert, assessing Hunter Kier, as recounted in eSchool News
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
Parents keep being told the first step for a struggling reader is a name for the problem. Kier’s story argues the first step is a hard look at the teaching, and decades of reading science back her. The villain here is not any teacher or school leader; it is a guessing-based approach that stayed in classrooms for decades after the evidence turned against it, and the slow-moving system that kept it there. Nobody will ever advocate for your child as hard as you will, and you are the one adult positioned to ask both questions in the right order.
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Your school district must evaluate your child free of charge if you ask in writing, whatever your income and whatever the outcome (US, 34 CFR 300.111 and 300.301(b)). That route takes time and answers a different question than you do. This one starts today, from what you already know.
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A screener is a starting point, not a diagnosis. If your child might need formal accommodations (an IEP or 504 plan), or you suspect a vision, hearing or medical cause, pursue a professional evaluation too. That is the only route to those supports.
References
- eSchool News — "My son wasn't dyslexic. He was never properly taught to read" by Jenny Kier (July 23, 2026)
- The Nation's Report Card — NAEP 2024 Reading: National Trends, Grades 4 and 8
- APM Reports — "New reading laws sweep the nation following Sold a Story" (October 16, 2025)
- Emily Hanford / APM Reports — "At a Loss for Words" investigation (2019)
- National Reading Panel Report (2000) — explicit, systematic reading instruction
- Keith Rayner et al. — eye-movement research on skilled reading (multiple studies, 1998-2016)
- Mark Seidenberg, "Language at the Speed of Sight" (2017)
- Stanislas Dehaene, "Reading in the Brain"; Maryanne Wolf, "Proust and the Squid"; David Geary — biologically primary vs. secondary knowledge
- Sally Shaywitz (Yale) and Elise Temple (Stanford) — fMRI studies of reading-intervention brain change
- International Dyslexia Association — 2025 definition of dyslexia
