The Woman Winning the Reading Wars

About 700,000 teachers have enrolled in the intensive reading course written by Moats, pictured outside her home in rural Vermont —John Tully for TIME Louisa Moats was at a conference in Daphne, Ala., earlier this year when she was approached by a group of teachers.

For the 81-year-old, this was a relatively new occurrence.

“They’re poorly paid, they don’t look very healthy, they certainly didn’t have an elite education and I feel this concern and admiration for them as they do this job,” she says, with her characteristic frankness.

“They come up to me, with this glazed, starry-eyed look, and thank me as if I, personally, was the conduit to their renewed sense of purpose and competence.

I get that a lot now.” Moats has become a late-in-life heroine, at least in some circles, because of a teacher-training program she wrote decades ago that has become a buzzy property.

She is not exactly basking in the attention.

“I take it with a grain of salt,” she says, sitting in her remote Vermont lake house.

“Behind that is my sense that what I would want them to do is probably not exactly what’s going on in their classroom, but it’s a reasonable enough approximation that it’s making a difference for kids.” Her skepticism can be forgiven.

For a long time, Moats found herself on the losing side of America’s so-called reading wars, the back-and-forth over the best way to teach kids to read.

She and her cohort of researchers promote the idea that reading is a skill that must be painstakingly taught, first through an understanding of the way sounds make up speech and get represented as letters, then through explicit instruction on how language works.

But the prevailing view, until a few years ago, was that most children would figure out how to decode the letters if given enough encouragement, stimulating material, and context clues, just as they do with speech.

“This is still something I ponder all the time,” Moats says, about why schools chose to teach the way they did.

One explanation she has landed on: people did not keep up with the research.

“Usually they have not sat down and looked at the evidence—the nature of the evidence, the scope of the evidence, the durability of the evidence—and so they don’t understand what the science is about.” Interest in “the science” has recently increased dramatically, alongside the level of panic about literacy rates in the U.S.