Is Our Children Reading?

Nancy Coffman was at a literacy conference when an email hit her inbox detailing the state budget’s education spending. A $2 million allocation for Failure Free Reading caught her eye.

Coffman, the president of the North Carolina branch of the International Dyslexia Association and a former middle school teacher and literacy trainer, had followed the state’s investments in training teachers and believed the state had made important in-roads in the last few years. But the Failure Free Reading curriculum is not aligned with current research about how children learn to read.

“It just doesn’t make any sense,” Coffman said. 

The educational software company is best known for a sight reading program that forgoes phonics, in which words are sounded out. The company was started more than 30 years ago by Joseph Lockavitch, a Concord-area businessman who was previously the director of exceptional children at Kannapolis city schools. 

In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Lockavitch created a software program that he experimented with on Kannapolis students before leaving the school system to pursue his business full time.

It was one of four programs selected in the early 2000s to be part of a U.S. Department of Education-funded study to test for effectiveness of literacy interventions for struggling students. Researchers noted school districts across the country were spending hundreds of millions on educational products, without much research on efficacy. 

The study found that the 93 students who used Failure Free Reading saw no discernible improvement in understanding the sounds associated with letters or fluency, but “potentially positive”—albeit minor—improvement in comprehension compared to peers. 

Another 2009 study on effective programs for struggling readers excluded Failure Free Reading entirely because the research it provided used improper evaluations—like attributing any gains to the program and not having a control group.

Despite scant evidence of effectiveness, Failure Free Reading has been used in classrooms across the country, and several districts in North Carolina, for years. This year’s state budget gave the program $2 million for use in 24 middle schools in the state, following $2.5 million allocated from the General Assembly two years ago. 

Coffman initially thought its inclusion was simply an “ill-informed decision,” and sent letters to about 30 lawmakers and state education officials inquiring about why it would invest in a program whose claims of effectiveness are “completely unfounded.”

Her letter caught the attention of Superintendent of Public Instruction Catherine Truitt, whose office replied the same day.

In an email shared with The Assembly under the Public Records Act, DPI’s Director of Government Affairs Jamey Falkenbury told Coffman that officials were “very disappointed” to see Failure Free Reading in the budget, and that the money could be spent on better interventions. 

Truitt’s team had “sounded the alarm on multiple occasions to the [General Assembly] about this vendor and how inappropriate it was to fund such a platform knowing it runs counter to everything we are working on,” he wrote.

Its inclusion also alarmed Rebecca Felton, a consultant with the North Carolina State Improvement Project, a federally-funded project within DPI that trains and coaches teachers in effective reading instruction. 

“I see kids every day who can’t read, and many of them are in middle school or even high school,” Felton said. “I don’t blame the educators—they don’t know any better—but I do blame legislators for not consulting with the people who do know.”

‘I’m Not Even Sure That Makes Sense’ 

Lockavitch says his software has something human teachers don’t: it’s “infinitely patient,” he said, as it will repeat the same word as many times as a student needs. 

The vocabulary program is meant to help middle- and high-school students learn multisyllabic words on sight, rather than sounding them out. To do so, it introduces new words and then includes them in short stories. 

Failure Free Reading’s website touts its benefits: “Since everything is visual and oral, students don’t have to know to to read to learn to read!” (sic)

A sample lesson begins with five vocabulary words that all start with the same letter, such as attorney, accommodate, acquaintance, abundant, and astounded. Each word is introduced with a definition and synonyms, and then it prompts the student to answer a yes/no and a multiple choice question. 

Then it unlocks a game one can only liken to a mashup of Atari’s Pong and Asteroids, with the vocabulary words ricocheting across the screen in Comic Sans font. After learning 30 words, students get a book of short stories that use the words.

Lockavitch told The Assembly in an interview that the program is based on “the principle of spaced learning, structure, and predictability.”

The words come from a 34-year-old vocabulary list of the then-most commonly-used words in disciplines like reading, science, and mathematics. It is no longer published.

Lynne Loeser, a reading researcher and secretary of the North Carolina branch of the International Dyslexia Association, said that teaching kids solely from vocabulary lists is not recommended, as it doesn’t reflect how our brains learn and store words. 

Instead, current research suggests vocabulary is better learned by selecting words from a text that students encounter in their studies, teaching multiple meanings and the word’s morphology—the meaning of word roots, prefixes, and suffixes—and encouraging students to come up with their own sentences that use the word.  

Several researchers expressed concerns about the words the program uses. Sometimes it doesn’t show that there can be multiple definitions of a word. Sometimes a word appears in an odd context. 

For example, a short story in the program using H words is about a car crash, and it states that a hedge “hobbled” a driver’s ability to see oncoming traffic.

Most people would read “hobbled” as meaning to walk with a limp. While it can mean impaired, this use in the story is uncommon and requires an “essence of intention,” said Kristen Beach, a literacy researcher, UNC-Charlotte professor, and member of a 2016 federally-funded effort to create a vocabulary-building curriculum for middle schoolers. 

“In the text, it was the hedge that hobbled the driver’s ability to see,” Beach said. “I’m not even sure that makes sense.”

How We Learn to Read

Teachers, administrators, and academics have fought for decades about the best way to teach literacy. 

Felton, the state consultant, knows it well from her experience researching dyslexia since the 1980s. She was working as a researcher in the early 2000s when the state Department of Public Instruction asked her to study children who were struggling to read and develop a teacher training program based on Science of Reading.

Science of Reading, or SoR, is an international collection of scientifically-backed research that shows how students learn to read, comprehend, and write. At its foundation is phonics, or the principle that language is written with symbols that compose sounds, and that we blend those sounds together to make words, a process called decoding. Over time, decoding becomes automatic, but learning how is critical to teaching both native English and English-learning readers.

In 2000, a federal panel concluded that phonics, along with other practices, is critical to teaching children to read. But phonics weren’t required to be taught in North Carolina public elementary schools until the legislature passed the Excellent Public Schools Act in 2021. 

Failure Free Reading’s vocabulary program excludes phonics and other elements of the science of reading, like morphology, which can help a student break down words like “courageous” and “cautious” into their roots and suffixes to decipher meaning. Because it’s taught online, it doesn’t provide for interpersonal learning—which is even more critical for multilingual learners and students with disabilities, Beach said. 

Failure Free Learning’s website states that the vocabulary program is for struggling readers, special education students, at-risk students, and multiple language learners alike. Lockavitch is working with the ESL director at the Catawba County School District to adopt his program for multilingual learners.

Maria Coady, a professor of multilingual education at North Carolina State University, questioned how the same program that is used for struggling readers would be used for multilingual learners, most of whom are not struggling with learning disabilities.

Rigorous vocabulary learning is critical for listening, reading, speaking, and writing, but multilingual learners need to interact with language through a combination of instruction on word morphology, talking with peer groups and practicing oral language, Coady said. 

The Assembly asked five literacy researchers to review Failure Free Reading’s “Verbal Master” curriculum. All five said that they would never introduce words alphabetically, as the vocabulary program does, and emphasized that the words need to be used in more contexts, like peer discussion and reading texts. Four questioned the words the program uses; two noted some words were used improperly.

“Grouping words for instruction is really important for vocabulary, and grouping alphabetically is definitely not something that I would recommend,” said Beach, noting that there are few “stand-alone, plug and play” interventions that support deep vocabulary development for middle schoolers. 

What Schools Want

The Assembly reached out to all 24 schools that were approved to use Failure Free Reading, and all but two responded. Only five are currently using the program, while 10 others tried it and then stopped using it. 

Lake Norman Charter School is one of nine schools that were approved but chose not to use the Failure Free Reading. Sara Lay, the community relations director for the school, gave several reasons.

“Number one, it isn’t consistent with teaching kids reading, and teaching kids the reading skill set,” Lay said. 

The school also didn’t want to add a new program as students and educators were readjusting to in-person learning after the pandemic, and the administration worried about adjusting students to a program that isn’t permanently funded. 

In March 2023, Jeannie Roberson, an administrator at Weldon City Schools in Halifax County, emailed the Department of Public Instruction to clarify whether they could use the previously approved funds for a different vendor.

“We are not interested in using these funds for this vendor and would not have accepted these funds had we known that we could ONLY use them for Failure Free Reading,” Roberson wrote. “We have several reading programs already that have proven beneficial for our district thus far.”

In Harnett County, 262 students across three middle schools are currently using the program. The county shared feedback from eight teachers; just one had a positive take. Four brought up software issues that impaired student progress, and five had nothing favorable to say about the program.

“I think the idea is good, but just giving them busy work was unproductive,” one teacher wrote. “Do they need the extra help? Yes, but there has to be something that will motivate them to receive and apply that help.”

Another wrote that students simply clicked through the lessons. “The students complained that the material was either way too hard or way too easy and that there was not a middle ground that fit them,” wrote another. “I don’t know if I have seen any results that have made a difference,” wrote a fourth.

Lockavitch often touts that “preliminary results” show 95 percent of students have higher vocabulary knowledge after using his program. But the evaluation only tests whether students memorized the definitions and synonyms presented to them. This doesn’t mean students are able to apply the vocabulary in new contexts, make connections to other places they have seen the word, or that they have learned word components like prefixes, suffixes, and the root, Coady said.

“Research shows these are such decontextualized lists that we basically memorize them,” Coady said. “But it doesn’t have meaning because it’s not connected to something.”

The way Lockavitch’s program tests for student learning is full of errors, six researchers pointed out to The Assembly, noting that the program’s multiple-choice assessments test students on the same information they learned and that Lockavitch’s “studies” failed to use appropriate research design. These omissions are not immediately apparent to school officials who aren’t experts in vetting programs, Felton said.

“When someone presents a software or something of that nature, you don’t necessarily get the con side,” said Eugene Slocum, the superintendent of Alpha Academy, a Fayetteville charter school that participated in a Failure Free Reading pilot last year. Slocum saw reports that showed students who used the program had positive results, but acknowledged that software’s proprietary assessments don’t necessarily correlate with positive learning outcomes.

It’s not uncommon to fund new, less-vetted vendors, said Marguerite Roza, the director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. It can even be good. “They’re the ones who can figure something new out,” she said. “So sometimes we give a path to the lack of evidence, because we think that’s how new ideas grow up.”

But this isn’t the case with Failure Free Reading, which has been around for decades and was included in an extensive prior study that showed little to no positive impact.

A Budget Mystery

When the legislature first funded Failure Free Reading in 2021, the money came from the $122 billion set aside for elementary, middle, and high schools in the American Rescue Plan. Ten percent of those funds are used at the state’s discretion, and in North Carolina, the legislature, not DPI, decided how that money was spent.

The Edunomics Lab estimates that across the country, vendors like Lockavitch received an additional $40-60 billion through that education aid during the pandemic, sometimes because they lobbied lawmakers for an earmark. Roza suspects that was the case with Failure Free Reading, which was given a no-bid, direct appropriation.

“I do think it sounds like this is almost funded like a pet program,” Roza said. “Obviously, legislators do that. But right now, with schooling, that doesn’t seem like the right time to do it.”

The funding in this year’s budget included $300,000 of federal funds allocated directly to Lockavitch’s JFL Enterprises, as well as $1.7 million of state tax dollars for schools to purchase the curriculum.

Lockavitch said he spoke with Republican House Education Appropriations Committee Chair John Torbett and Rep. Hugh Blackwell. One of Lockavitch’s employees also wrote in an email that Democratic Rep. Michael Wray had pushed for his legislative district’s schools’ inclusion. 

Neither Wray nor Blackwell responded to emails from The Assembly.

The earmark likely came from one of four legislators, said Viddia Torbett, the legislative assistant for Torbett, in an email. 

When funding requests were submitted to budget chairs in June, Failure Free Reading was not on the list, Viddia said. She pointed to Rep. Jeffrey Elmore and Sen. Michael Lee, the education chairs in their respective chambers; and House Speaker Tim Moore, or Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger as the most likely candidates for getting it in the budget. 

Neither Elmore nor Moore returned calls and emails inquiring about the allocation. 

Berger and Lee’s office did not comment on how the money got into the budget. An appropriations advisor for Berger said the General Assembly “will be able to (and plans to) reevaluate” the efficacy of the program during next year’s short session.

How the program will be evaluated is an open question. DPI officials noted that any funding allocated through the agency must have evaluation measures in place. But this came directly through the legislature, with no requirements for schools or districts to share information on outcomes  with the agency.

Failure Free Reading isn’t the only education program to receive a no-bid contract using funds passed through DPI. WRAL reported that an online portal for high school seniors pursuing their next step received $5 million despite not meeting DPI’s standards to protect student grades and information.

In an internal document obtained by The Assembly, a senior DPI staff member wrote that “We would like to understand the efficacy of the programs being implemented so we can provide the feedback.”

Ren Larson is a staff reporter at The Assembly. She previously worked for The Texas Tribune and ProPublica’s investigative team, and as a data reporter with The Arizona Republic. She holds a master’s of public policy and an M.A. in international and area studies from the University of California, Berkeley.