Testimony during this year’s legislative session for a bill to improve the state’s reading performance during this year’s General Assembly indicates an astonishing 200,000 Kentucky public school students spread across all the grades have major problems with reading.

Information included in a new Bluegrass Institute Policy Point about reading, “What Milton Wright knew about reading instruction, but lots of teachers apparently don’t,” indicates that while Kentucky’s reading problems are real and involve a massive number of students, it doesn’t need to remain this way.

Important scientific research into the reading problem has identified the most effective ways to teach reading. Taking advantage of this “Science of Reading,” Mississippi, a state long-considered to be at the bottom of the educational stack, has already made great progress. Other states are taking notice and are starting to emulate the improvement already well underway among students in the Magnolia State.

Unfortunately, Kentucky isn’t one of those states. In fact, that bill, which would have brought the same successful approaches in Mississippi for teaching reading to Kentucky, easily passed the Kentucky Senate only to die in the House without even getting a hearing.

“The bill was killed due to lobbying by a group of special reading teachers putting self-interests ahead of what’s best for the commonwealth,” said report author Bluegrass Institute education analyst Richard Innes. “However, those remedial reading teachers aren’t beginning to meet the need. With 200,000 students in serious trouble, this group only serves the needs of about 10,000 students a year. And somewhat less than half of all the elementary schools in the state even have these reading teachers.”

Even worse, the report points out that some of the reading programs these special reading teachers are using are now being challenged for not following the science of reading.

“Kentucky’s reading performances as shown in the report make it clear that a lot of other Kentucky teachers must not be using the right stuff to teach reading,” Innes added.

It doesn’t need to be this way, and the report discusses what to do about this massive problem.

By the way, you might be wondering: Who was Milton Wright? We’ll just say here that he had teaching experience and knew the wrong stuff about reading when he saw it.

As to the rest of Wright’s story, which will give you an idea about how long the reading instruction problem has been going on, you’ll have to read “What Milton Wright knew about reading instruction, but lots of teachers apparently don’t” to find out.