I am pleased to publish this guest post* by G. Reid Lyon PhD and Doug Carnine, PhD
Why a Common Knowledge Foundation and Professional Language Are Essential for Improving Reading Proficiency
G. Reid Lyon, Ph.D.
Senior Advisor, ALLIED Hub Advocacy, Leadership, Learning, Implementation, and Educational Policy, Drexel University
Doug Carnine, Ph.D.
Founder, Evidence Advocacy Center
Date: June 28,
2026 Category: Leadership Reading Time: 15 min
About the authors
G. Reid Lyon and Doug Carnine bring complementary expertise and decades of experience in evidence-based fields. Lyon specialized in neuroscience and learning disorders at the University of New Mexico followed by postdoctoral training investigating how neural systems support reading development and where reading difficulties originate. Carnine was trained as an experimental psychologist—through a University of Illinois NSF undergraduate fellowship—and dedicated his career to designing and testing instructional methods for children at risk of academic failure.
Lyon trained neuropsychologists, neuroscientists, medical students and residents in neuroanatomy and neurophysiology within the constraints of a mature profession that had built rigorous requirements for training, certification, ethics, licensure, and hierarchies of evidence. In contrast, Carnine, who trained educators during his tenure at the University of Oregon, was shocked to discover that education lacked rigorous requirements for training, certification, ethics, licensure, and hierarchies of evidence.
Their shared conclusion, which comes from two different sets of experiences, is unambiguous: education too often views evidence as a question of "positionality" whereby rigor in assessing and ranking research findings are dismissed in favor of judging alignment with pre-determined ideologies.
Executive Summary
The United States does not suffer from a shortage of scientific knowledge about reading development, reading difficulties, or effective instruction. More than six decades of interdisciplinary research have produced a robust and increasingly convergent understanding of how reading proficiency develops and how it can be improved. Yet reading outcomes remain alarmingly low.
This paradox points to a clear conclusion: the primary obstacle is no longer a gap in scientific discovery. It is the failure to institutionalize that knowledge within the systems responsible for preparing and supporting educators and educational leaders.
Central Argument
The reading crisis is not only an instructional, curriculum, or policy problem. It is fundamentally a professionalization problem. Until education establishes a universally shared knowledge base, a common professional language, consistent preparation standards, and enforceable accountability mechanisms, significant variability in professional knowledge, instructional practice, and student outcomes will persist. This process must begin within university education faculties, where academic freedom should take second place to empirical evidence.
Unlike mature professions—such as medicine, engineering, nursing, aviation, and speech-language pathology—education has not built the guardrails that ensure scientific knowledge is translated into practice at scale. Professionalization is the missing link.
The Paradox of Reading Science: We Know Enough, Yet Proficiency Remains Low
Few areas of education have benefited from a more extensive scientific knowledge base than reading. Beginning in the 1960s and accelerating across subsequent decades, researchers identified the linguistic, cognitive, developmental, and neurobiological foundations of reading acquisition. This work culminated in landmark interdisciplinary efforts—including the NICHD Reading Research Program—that integrated findings across disciplines, providing the basis for developing instructional programs and assessment systems as well as the means of implementing them.
Alongside the science of reading, advances in the science of learning, the science of instruction, and implementation science have further enriched this knowledge base. Together, four interlocking bodies of evidence define what the field now knows:
The Science of Reading and Writing
Decades of research have established core principles about how reading proficiency develops:
• Reading and writing are not acquired naturally, as spoken language is; they must be explicitly taught.
• Reading and writing are language-based developmental achievements.
• Reading and writing proficiency depends on multiple interacting components.
• "Risk for reading and writing difficulties can be identified early before formal schooling begins.
• Most struggling readers and writers can achieve proficiency with exposure to an adequate dose of explicit, systematic, evidence-based instruction, delivered by a knowledgeable practitioner.
• Effective instruction can shift developmental trajectories and strengthen the neural systems that support ongoing reading and writing achievement.
The core instructional components are based on these principles.
The Science of Learning
The relevant evidence base extends beyond “what works.” The science of learning examines how people acquire knowledge, retain it over time, generalize it to new contexts, and recover when learning breaks down. This science informs the conditions under which instruction is most likely to succeed.
The Science of Instruction
The science of instruction addresses both the design of content and its delivery. Preparing teachers to engage students is only as effective as the quality of the content they engage with. Instructional materials must be carefully structured, sequenced, practiced, and monitored to produce reliable learning outcomes.
Implementation Science
Implementation science is the scientific study of methods and strategies that facilitate the uptake of evidence-based practice and research into regular use by practitioners and policymakers.
The science of reading identifies the knowledge students must acquire. The science of learning explains how that knowledge is acquired, retained, and transferred. The science of instruction translates these findings into instructional practices comprising well-designed instruction—what to teach—and effective instructional delivery—how to teach—that reliably produce learning. Professional preparation and support should therefore include mastery of all three sciences. Implementation science focuses on closing the gap between what we know and what we do (the know-do gap) by identifying and removing barriers that impede the use of proven interventions and evidence-based practices.
From an implementation science foundation it is equally important to de-implement practices not aligned with the converging and replicated scientific knowledge. It is challenging for the learner to acquire and apply new information when they are exposed to valid and invalid practices particularly when implementing tiered instructional models. For example, the practice of using the three-cuing systems model is not supported as an accurate model of skilled word recognition or as an evidence-based method for teaching beginning readers to identify unfamiliar words. Likewise, the scientific evidence does not support using leveled predictable texts—particularly when paired with three-cuing prompts—as the primary means of teaching children to read words. In addition, the traditional running-record system—particularly MSV analysis, leveled-text placement, and self-correction ratios—is not well supported as a scientifically valid diagnostic or progress-monitoring system.
The Central Question
The question is no longer whether scientific knowledge exists. The question is why it has not become common professional practice. The answer lies in the professional structure of reading education—not in gaps in the evidence.
Education Has Not Yet Fully Professionalized
A profession is not defined merely by the dedication or rhetoric of its members. Mature professions develop the capacity to transmit, maintain, and apply scientific knowledge consistently across practitioners and institutions. They build infrastructure that makes optimal evidence-based practice the norm—and makes suboptimal practices harder to sustain.
Across mature professions—medicine, engineering, aviation, nursing, finance, and maritime operations—a consistent pattern emerges: evidence-based knowledge is institutionalized through low variance in shared standards, coherent training, competence-based licensure, and accountability systems that protect the public. These professions do not rely on persuasion alone. They rely on systems.
Education lacks comparable professional guardrails. As a result, children experience dramatically different learning opportunities depending on their location, the quality of their teachers’ preparation, local instructional traditions, and—most critically—whether leaders and systems align their policies and guidelines with the strongest available scientific evidence. This degree of variability would be unacceptable in any trusted profession. It should be unacceptable in reading education.
What Trusted Professions Provide That Reading Education Still Lacks
Mature professions typically institutionalize five pillars that collectively ensure coherence, competence, and adherence to evidence-based practice. These pillars also support enforcement mechanisms that reduce the persistence of ineffective practice.
Pillar 1: A Shared Knowledge Base
Trusted professions agree on foundational knowledge—even when they debate implementation details or interpret emerging findings differently. In reading education, professionals often enter practice with substantially different understandings of critical fundamentals, including:
• How reading develops across childhood
• Why reading difficulties occur
• The role of oral language—vocabulary, grammar, listening comprehension—in reading acquisition
• The role of encoding in word reading and automaticity
• The nature and identification of dyslexia and reading-related disorders
• How assessment should guide instructional decision-making
• What characteristics define effective reading instruction
When foundational constructs are not shared, professional disagreement becomes predictable and implementation unreliable. No profession can scale competence if its members do not share a core model of the phenomenon they are meant to address.
A Common Professional Language Is Central to the Shared Knowledge Base. Even among well-intentioned and well-educated professionals, shared language matters—because it determines what people actually mean when they invoke evidence and instruction. In reading education, key terms are routinely defined differently across universities, publishers, advocacy organizations, state agencies, and professional development providers. Terms such as “science of reading,” “structured literacy,” “explicit instruction,” “balanced literacy,” “dyslexia,” and “evidence-based” carry inconsistent meanings in the field. Even the term “reading” lacks an agreed definition.
This creates avoidable and costly problems:
• The same term can describe entirely different constructs.
• Different terms can describe the same construct.
• Collaboration slows as professionals talk past each other.
• Lack of clarity supports a “choose your own adventure” status quo, whereby no approach is seen as preferable over another.
• Implementation fidelity erodes when apparent agreement masks real disagreement.
A common professional language, which is part of the shared knowledge base, is not a stylistic preference. It is the infrastructure that makes knowledge transferable—and enforceable.
Pillar 2: Research-Aligned Preparation
Trusted professions align preparation to a shared knowledge base and require trainees to understand not only discipline-specific findings, but also the broader sciences of learning, instruction design, and delivery. Preparation in reading education must similarly include the content in Pillar 1.
In medicine, trainees learn evidence-based practice through structured, competence-centered programs. This means they learn about the process of knowledge generation via the use of rigorous quantitative and/or qualitative research methods; they also learn how to critique new research findings and to apply the principle of levels of evidence to practice decisions. In reading education, preparation remains highly variable and discretionary. Not all preparation programs ensure mastery of essential reading knowledge and instructional competencies, including the ability to design adaptations of reading instructional programs and deliver that instruction with fidelity. This variability helps explain why evidence-based instruction in classrooms often reflects inconsistencies in local training and support ecosystems than on a consistent and trusted professional standard.
Pillar 3: Licensure and Professional Development Rooted in Competence
In trusted professions, licensure signals demonstrated competence and the responsibility to protect the public. Professional development is not optional enrichment—it is structured, ongoing learning that sustains competence and aligns practice with advancing evidence, especially the operational decisions required to translate research into consistent instruction and effective error correction.
Education has not consistently built licensure and professional development systems around competence in evidence-based reading instruction. Licensure too often reflects completion of coursework rather than demonstrated mastery of relevant knowledge and skills.
Pillar 4: Accreditation with Teeth
Today, a large percentage of teacher-preparation programs that fail to prepare candidates effectively still receive accreditation. No other serious profession tolerates such laxity. This is a serious breech of community trust.
Pillar 5: Accountability for Professional Knowledge and Practice Quality
Trusted professions protect the public through accountability systems that address competence, defined as adherence to evidence-based standards. Accountability does not merely track outcomes—it monitors whether core professional practices are delivered competently and consistently, including fidelity to evidence-based instructional routines and delivery requirements grounded in the sciences of learning and instruction.
In education, accountability is too often inconsistent, symbolic, or diffuse. Systems frequently emphasize reporting student results without ensuring the implementation capacity, fidelity, or professional competence required to achieve those results.
The Pendulum Problem
Education is notoriously susceptible to pendulum swings. When evidence is treated as optional, virtually any practice can be judged as “in scope”, instruction regresses, and student data reflect this. Carnine’s Substack about “stopping the pendulum” reflects a broader pattern: reading education has repeatedly moved away from evidence-supported practices only to rediscover them after costly cycles of discrediting and re-adopting. In many cases faulty implementation is the culprit. When the predicted lack of progress is noted, rather than assessing implementation fidelity, the conclusion is frequently “we tried that and it didn't work” and then stumbling on to the next bright shiny thing.
Phonics instruction has been adopted (at least partially), abandoned, distorted, rediscovered, and marginalized again. Whole-language instruction displaced phonics; phonics later regained prominence; then it was pushed aside once more. These cycles are not evidence of a scientifically-based field. They reveal that professional systems have failed to institutionalize evidence-based practice as the default. Pendulum swings also emanate from superficial binary conceptualizations of reading development and instruction. Consider the decades of debate centered on “phonics versus whole language” and “phonics versus balanced literacy”. Reading proficiency is nested within oral language development and requires the acquisition of multiple componential reading skills and experiences, integrated through direct and systematic instruction. Joe Torgesen depicted the path to reading comprehension in the figure below.
Reducing reading development and instruction to “either-or” dichotomies ignore the complexity of the multiple factors essential for skilled reading.
Understanding the Pendulum
The pendulum is best understood as a symptom of incomplete professionalization. Trusted professions do not cycle between evidence-based and discredited practices, because professional guardrails restrict individual discretion and enforce standards of practice. Education lacks those guardrails—so local preference, ideology, and “reform churn” can override evidence repeatedly.
What Education Can Learn from Trusted Professions
Evidence alone does not protect the public. Trusted professions become trusted because they build systems that ensure evidence becomes practice—even amid disagreement and lapses among practitioners. Five lessons emerge from their example.
Lesson 1: Trusted Professions Reduce Preventable Harm
Trusted professions protect the public by institutionalizing evidence through guardrails and external accountability. They do not wait for voluntary compliance. History shows that during periods when evidence existed but was not uniformly applied, preventable harm occurred. The “period of preventable harm” can be defined as the gap between when evidence is established and when it becomes uniformly applied in practice.
Reading education appears to remain in such a period. Evidence-aligned practice is not universally required, consistently supported, celebrated, or effectively monitored.
Lesson 2: Members Adhere to a Shared Knowledge Base
In trusted professions, members are not free to disregard core standards of care. Practitioner judgement exists, but it operates within shared, enforceable boundaries. In education, the empirically-derived scientific knowledge base is not consistently treated as a governing standard. Practice therefore depends too heavily on local interpretation, leadership preferences, and curriculum adoption cycles.
Lesson 3: Noncompliance Is Made Harder
Trusted professions do not eliminate imperfect practice—but they reduce its invisibility and its tolerance. Education often allows ineffective practice to persist precisely because professional systems do not impose meaningful consequences for departures from evidence-based standards.
Lesson 4: Local Control Does Not Override the Knowledge Base
Local control and evidence-aligned professionalism can coexist. The problem is not local decision-making per se; it is local decisions made without enforceable, knowledge-based constraints. Trusted professions permit variation in context, style, and application while maintaining non-negotiable core standards. Education too often treats scientific evidence as negotiable—especially when school boards, district leaders, curriculum vendors, or preparation programs prefer alternatives – but not always for reasons that can be empirically supported
Lesson 5: Accountability Is the Key Mechanism
Accountability in trusted professions defines who is responsible for ensuring evidence-based practice—and establishes consequences when it does not occur. In reading education, accountability must be multi-level and enforceable. It should require:
• Classroom-level competence in evidence-based instructional routines and delivery
• Leadership responsibility for coaching, monitoring, and implementation quality
• District responsibility for fidelity to evidence-based practice across schools
• State monitoring that is both supportive and corrective when achievement levels are low and evidence-aligned practice is absent
• Clear “line of sight” between instruction as an input and student data as an output.
A Policy Agenda for Professionalizing Reading Education
Improving reading proficiency requires more than adopting new curricula or passing legislation. It requires building professional infrastructure that reliably translates scientific knowledge into daily practice. Five policy priorities are essential.
Priority 1: Establish a Common Knowledge Foundation
States should define the essential professional knowledge that all educators and educational leaders must possess regarding reading development, reading difficulties, assessment, and evidence-based instruction—grounded in the science of reading, the science of learning, and the science of instruction.
Priority 2: Establish a Common Professional Language
Preparation programs, licensure systems, professional organizations, and state agencies should adopt shared terminology and operational definitions grounded in cumulative scientific evidence. Ambiguous or inconsistently defined terms undermine implementation and accountability. Academic freedom should not extend to the teaching of concepts and practices that are not well-supported by robust empirical evidence.
Priority 3: Strengthen Evidence Standards
States should clearly distinguish between claims that are merely plausible and claims that are genuinely evidence-based. They should require stronger evidence standards for curriculum adoption, intervention selection, and professional development investments—and should make those standards transparent and publicly accountable. There should be a prioritizing of “levels of evidence” when appraising different instructional approaches.
Priority 4: Align Preparation and Licensure
Teacher and leadership preparation programs should be evaluated based on graduates’ demonstrated mastery of scientifically validated reading knowledge and instructional competencies, including the ability to design and deliver instruction consistent with the science of learning and the science of instruction. Licensure must reflect detailed assessment of course materials (e.g., assigned readings and assessments) and verified graduate competence, not mere exposure to coursework.
Priority 5: Build Accountability for Professional Knowledge and Implementation
Accountability systems should measure both student outcomes and the quality of professional preparation, professional learning, and implementation capacity across the system. This must include monitoring fidelity to evidence-based instructional practice and requiring corrective action when competence or implementation quality is absent.
Conclusion
The future of reading proficiency depends less on discovering new scientific principles than on institutionalizing existing knowledge within the professional systems that prepare and govern educators.
The unfinished work of professionalizing reading education is the construction of guardrails that ensure evidence is consistently taught, consistently understood, communicated through shared language, and consistently applied in practice.
This task is not primarily scientific. It is professional and it also requires re-calibration of the notion of academic freedom within university education faculties, so that accountability for stronger student outcomes begins as far upstream as possible. The evidence is available; the professional infrastructure remains incomplete. If education is to produce stable, sustained progress rather than perpetual and harmful pendulum swings, it must develop the shared knowledge base, professional language, competence-based preparation and licensure, and enforceable accountability systems that characterize every trusted profession.
The reading crisis is, at its core, a professionalization crisis. Addressing it requires treating professional infrastructure—not only pedagogy or policy—as the urgent priority it is.
*A version of this paper appeared in a substack article on Carnine’s substack page.
(C) Lyon & Carnine (2026)
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