Educators Were Sold a Story About Phonemic Awareness

The rise and fall of Heggerty is a cautionary tale. Are curriculum review organizations on the case?

In the so-called ‘Science of Reading’ era, educators were sold a story about phonemic awareness, turning a little-known product into the most-used curriculum in US schools.

A faddish approach was packaged as a curriculum supplement, then boosted by Science of Reading influencers, and it sold like hotcakes.

Today, it’s being walked back nationwide.

Heckuva cautionary tale.

How did this happen? Also, are curriculum reviewers working to ensure it doesn’t happen again?

A Research Primer on Oral-Only Phonemic Awareness

Let’s start with the relevant research, because some educators are still getting this memo.

Phonemic awareness is an important skill for students to develop, but they should be learning about sounds with letters and words in the lessons—as opposed to being taught sounds in isolation, which doesn’t produce better readers.

Piles of evidence back this position:

The National Reading Panel (NRP) report, published in 2000, included a metaanalysis on phonemic awareness (PA) instruction. It made clear that teaching PA with letters is more effective than teaching PA without letters, with substantially larger transfer effects to both reading and spelling:

“Teaching children to manipulate phonemes with letters created effect sizes almost twice as large as teaching children without letters (d = 0.67 vs. 0.38). Likewise, letters benefited spelling more than no letters, with the effect size almost twice as great (d = 0.61 vs. 0.34).”

The NRP report was direct: “PA training makes a stronger contribution to reading and spelling performance when the training includes…letters than when training is limited to speech.” It pointed out that Phonemic Awareness taught with letters essentially becomes phonics instruction, because you’re explicitly linking phonemes to graphemes.

In 2008, the National Early Literacy Panel published an analysis of early reading interventions, finding that “interventions that did not include a print-focused component (i.e., those with PA training only) had a significantly weaker effect on print-specific outcomes” than interventions where PA work was paired with print.

A 2022 meta-analysis on studies of children with reading struggles sent the same signal:

“Graphemes should be incorporated into phonemic awareness instruction.”

A 2024 Meta-Analysis attempted to identify the right dosage of PA instruction. Looking across sixteen studies which reported instructional time, researchers found benefit for only 10 hours of dedicated PA instruction, after which diminishing returns kick in. Further, PA instruction with letters was most effective:

“PA instruction effects improved with increasing dosage up to 10.20 hours of instruction (dmax = 0.74), after which the effects declined. Moderator analyses revealed these results held for students at-risk for reading disabilities and basic PA skills instruction. Furthermore, moderator analyses showed that the dosage response curves exhibited a convex parabolic form (a U shape) in PA instruction with letters, with effects continually increasing after 16 hours of PA instruction.”

This finding takes us back to the National Reading Panel’s point: a well-structured phonics program (which includes blending and other PA practices) will effectively deliver that 10 hours of PA instruction. Students will get the necessary dosage in any solid program.

You’d think these studies would have been gospel in the Science of Reading era.

Alas…

Heggerty’s Rise—and Pivot

The Science of Reading era represented a welcome backlash against phonics-lite curricula and the harms of cueing.

Yet corrections have a way of turning into overcorrections. A “more is always better” mindset flourished, and theories about oral-only phonemic awareness became fashionable, in spite of all those studies listed above.

Researcher David Kilpatrick, editor of the Reading League journal, boosted the concept, as did the popular LETRS training. Teaching guides by Kilpatrick and Louisa Moats endorsed oral-only PA¹ for struggling readers.

A company called Heggerty offered an oral-only PA curriculum, and it quickly blew up in schools. Heggerty was easy to use, and asked only 10-15 minutes per day. It felt science-y and phonics-y. Plus LETRS trainers promoted Heggerty by name. And who would question David Kilpatrick and Louisa Moats about their ideas? Certainly not the hundreds of thousands of teachers flocking to Facebook groups to improve their teaching.

By 2022, Heggerty claimed to be in 70% of US districts. In Ohio, Heggerty was the most-used curriculum, with 50% market share. In fact, I don’t know of any single curriculum with its market penetration, in any subject area.

Many researchers questioned the faddish rise of oral-only PA in social media. In 2021, Matt Burns, Devin Kearns, and seven co-authors wrote a notable paper attempting to slow its roll.

Eventually, even Heggerty conceded that oral-only PA wasn’t good practice, as multiple studies showed that its program didn’t improve reading outcomes². Heggerty added letters into its lessons, effectively walking back its own approach.

This problem isn’t exclusive to Heggerty. As Kim Lockhart points out, ‘It’s Kilpatrick’s Equipped for Reading Success, too! It should be called “Equipped for Phonological Awareness Success” because no where does it say that letters need to be involved!!!’ Still, Heggerty was the product that swept American schools.

EdWeek and Hechinger Report have reported on these developments, yet oral-only remains rooted in many classrooms. In Facebook groups, you’ll see teachers clinging to the oral-only version of Heggerty because “It’s just 10 minutes per day and kids like it.”

Ten minutes may not seem like a lot of time, but it’s more than 10% of the time in the average ELA block. The opportunity cost is real.

When students spend weeks on oral-only instruction before diving into letter-sound work, this, too, has an opportunity cost. There are only 160-170 instructional days in the average school year, and every lesson counts.

These are important curriculum conversations.

Are Curriculum Reviewers on the Case?

We’ve seen this story before: poor practices spreading because they’re designed into curriculum. Surely curriculum review organizations are screening for oral-only PA, to help the field align with the evidence—right?

Welp.

EdReports:

The EdReports ‬rubric arguably encourages oral-only phonemic awareness. Here’s the PA section:

Indicator 1E carries the most risk of confusion: “Materials include daily, brief lessons in phonemic awareness.” One could interpret this as encouraging PA instruction to be a Separate Thing.

(Remember, each EdReports review is done by 4-5 educators who receive only 25 hours of training; risks of confusion are high in any case.)

The EdReports Evidence Guide is more worrisome. Its Phonemic Awareness section reads: “Students benefit most when they first develop strong phoneme-level awareness–such as blending and‬ segmenting–before connecting those sounds to letters. Introducing phoneme awareness prior to or in tandem‬ with letter instruction supports the acquisition of the alphabetic principle and avoids potential confusion‬‭ between phonemes and letter names or shapes.”

Here, EdReports cites a paper by Susan Brady, published by the Reading League in 2020, which frankly sends mixed signals³. Overall, I’m not sure this paper supports the EdReports conclusions. It does, however, offer fabulous evidence for my future Substack rant about the confusing signals in SOR spaces.

As for actual reviews by EdReports…

EdReports never reviewed the oral-only version of Heggerty, so we don’t know how its reviewers would have handled it. It gave a middling review to Heggerty’s updated, letter-inclusive program.

Reading League:

The Reading League rubric has been clear that you shouldn’t teach letters without sounds, but there is nothing related to teaching sounds without letters.

It goes into the weeds on many aspects of curriculum, so it’s curious⁴ that the rubric stays silent on this point.

Here’s the 2023 version⁵:

The Reading League hasn’t reviewed either version of Heggerty because the publisher declined a review… twice.

Because some state leaders have testified to the comprehensiveness of EdReports, it bears restating: neither EdReports nor the Reading League offer complete pictures of the curriculum landscape. Publishers have declined to submit materials for review to both organizations—sometimes for reasonable reasons, and sometimes for… other reasons.

Evidence for ESSA:

Evidence for ESSA lists zero studies for Heggerty Phonemic Awareness (again, it was studied, and it wasn’t good).

It lists only one study for Heggerty’s letter-inclusive program, which shows a .17 effect size. Regrettably, Evidence for ESSA fails to tell readers how bad this is; an effect size below .15 is the equivalent of doing no instruction at all, and .17 is below the levels seen for solid phonics programs.

That’s it. No one else has been getting into these weeds.

Looking across this picture, it’s hard to blame educators for confusion.

Who’s Telling it Straight?

Curriculum reviewers are not helping the field break up with oral-only phonemic awareness, leaving a fad / overcorrection rooted in schools.

Instructional minutes are precious, and these practices are stealing time from the other things we want in ELA (books, knowledge-building, writing, I-could-go-on).

Who’s bringing these memos to educators?

In the next installment, I look at LLMs. What do they know about oral-only phonemic awareness?

Spoiler: not enough.

---

The next installment was published on my personal Substack, School Yourself. I publish curriculum-specific pieces with the Curriculum Insight Project, and broader reflections on policy and the K-12 landscape over there. The topics overlap—for example, the piece on book-rich, knowledge-rich curriculum fueling the Southern Surge arguably fits better here—but I try to pick the right publication, as best I can. Thanks for reading.

1. This teacher guide on teaching phonemic awareness, with Kilpatrick and Moats as coauthors, is still live on the Lexia website:

When you read all of the studies in this Substack, do you conclude that “we need more research to address this question”? Would you tell a teacher to spend instructional time on oral-only phonemic awareness while we wait for more studies? Me, neither.

2. Dear reader, I only learned about this FCRR study yesterday, while asking a friend to review a draft of this piece. And I am a part-time resident of Literacy Twitter and FB. It really can take forever for word to spread about these things, even among Very Online People.

3. I wanted to bang my head against a wall while reading this paper.

It sends mixed signals about oral-only PA. First, it makes a case for starting instruction with oral-only PA: “Fostering phoneme awareness before introducing letters is advised because it allows focus on the spoken form of phonemes, avoiding confusion with visual letters or letter names.” Notably, this section of the paper contains no research citations.

Later in the paper, Brady sends a different message: “Phoneme awareness instruction should be integrated with letter instruction.”

OK, then.

Beyond these inconsistent messages…. why is there no mention at all of the recommended dosage? If a teacher is going to teach some sounds before introducing letters, how long does Brady think she should do it? Ten minutes? Ten lessons? Ten weeks of instruction? Half of kindergarten? We absolutely fail teachers, and encourage the “more is always better” mindset, when we fail to give dosage guidance.

Also readers, I am a curriculum fan because good curriculum, with a clear scope and sequence and lesson guidance, offers some dosage guidance by its very nature. Excellent curriculum goes further and talks in terms of instructional minutes.

Back to the paper… I’m gobsmacked that this paragraph was published at all, but especially in a journal marketed to teachers:

“Teaching phoneme awareness for a set of individual phonemes should be followed by instruction in the corresponding letter(s) when phoneme awareness as a listening activity is well established for those phonemes. This order helps clarify for students that phonemes are elements in spoken words and that letters are how those speech sounds are represented in writing (i.e., the alphabetic principle).”

File this paper under: Things that explain the implementation confusion in the SOR era. Also, reasons there is a research-to-practice divide in K-12 education.

4. Or maybe it’s completely predictable, when Kilpatrick edits the Reading League journal and Moats is on its “Defining Movement Coalition.” It’s easier to stay silent on a topic than take on your BFFs about their pet theories.

This isn’t just a critique of the Reading League; in the last 5 years, many literacy leaders would tell you privately that they worried about the rise of Heggerty and the oral-only fad, but they weren’t saying it loudly and publicly. Critiquing the Patron Saints of a movement isn’t for everyone.

5. The Reading League just released an updated rubric with a goal of improved clarity, but it, too, does nothing to signal to the field that sounds should consistently be taught with letters.

I share the 2023 version above because it’s the signal the field has been living with for the last few years… the same years that Heggerty was putting a letters patch on its flawed PA program.