Melissa Whitmore is no newbie reading teacher. But even in her 29th year in education, she still has trouble finding materials that meet all of the needs of her older students who are struggling readers.
Whitmore, a secondary reading interventionist at Belleville Middle and High School in Belleville, Wis., works with many students who need support in foundational reading skills, such as breaking down complex, multisyllabic words. But because these skills are usually taught in early elementary grades, there aren’t that many resources tailored for teenagers who still need help mastering them.
Another roadblock: Whitmore wants to make sure that her students still get access to grade-level content, but not all of it is accessible to them because of their reading abilities.
Finding solutions to these problems is “a very challenging process,” she said.
“A 15-year-old knows when a text is written for someone who is younger,” Whitmore said. “Engagement is so tied with dignity for an adolescent.”
As the “science of reading” movement has shifted many schools’ approach to early reading instruction, some districts have turned a closer eye to supporting older students with reading difficulties, too. But sourcing materials remains a stubborn problem.
In a 2025 EdWeek Research Center survey, fewer than half of teachers, school leaders, and district leaders said that their schools or districts provided resources or programs targeted to support middle and high school struggling readers.
Read on for three of the most common problems teachers and researchers identified in sourcing and using texts—and how educators are tackling them.
Problem 1: Finding phonics materials that target older students’ specific needs
Many older students struggle with foundational reading skills, like decoding words. But their needs aren’t usually the same as those of kindergarteners or 1st graders, said Jessica Toste, an associate professor of special education at the University of Texas at Austin, in an interview with Education Week in November.
Usually these students have been in reading intervention for years, and have received many lessons in basic phonics. By the time they’re in middle or high school, they can decode short, phonetically regular words. More instruction in these common, everyday words, Toste said, “doesn’t really help them bridge to more complex words.”
Instead, she said, students who have mastered these basic skills but still have decoding issues could benefit from instruction in breaking down multisyllabic words—the longer, often academic vocabulary that students need to access to succeed in more demanding middle and high school classes.
Some programs do target multisyllabic decoding specifically. Toste and her colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin have created an open-access program called Word Connections; another from researchers at the University at Buffalo, Read STOP Write, is also free for educators to use.
Still, there aren’t as many commercially available programs covering multisyllabic decoding as there are that teach more basic phonics skills, said John Strong, the associate director of the Center for Literacy and Reading Instruction at the University at Buffalo’s Graduate School of Education, and one of the creators of Read STOP Write.
And even when using existing programs, teachers of older students say they need to mix and match resources more than they might with younger kids. By the time students get to middle school or beyond, their reading abilities are “like Swiss cheese,” said Cindi Bauman, a reading teacher at East Irondequoit Middle School in Rochester, N.Y. They have gaps in their knowledge in unexpected places.
Bauman pulls decoding lessons from several programs and weaves them together, depending on student need. She uses some material from REWARDS, a reading intervention for students in grades 4-12, and some from Corrective Reading, an intervention for students in upper elementary grades and above.
Problem 2: Tying foundational skills interventions to grade-level reading materials
Several teachers said they needed more texts that could act as bridges, helping students practice the skills they’re working on—like multisyllabic decoding—in full texts.
In early grades, one answer is decodable books, stories that are written to give students practice with the sound-letter patterns they’re learning. But few similar options exist for older students that target more complex vocabulary or are written to appeal to preteen and teenage interests.
“It’s an absolute wasteland,” said Jamie Class, a special education teacher in Southern California. Class recently started using a new series of decodable chapter books published by the company Storyshares, and has also written some of her own materials.
She’s also focused some of her skills instruction on key words she knows will come up in grade-level reading—a strategy that’s supported by some research.
One 2024 study found that 4th and 5th graders’ decoding ability predicted their multisyllabic word reading success, but so did their vocabulary and knowledge of morphology, or the meaning of different word parts like prefixes and suffixes.
This and other research suggests that word-level instruction for older students “should probably combine decoding instruction with meaning instruction,” said Strong, who conducted the study along with his University at Buffalo colleague Blythe Anderson and lead author Laura Tortorelli of Michigan State University.
Linking skills to class content in this way could also have positive socioemotional effects, Strong said. “If they’re doing phonics, they just think it’s baby work,” he said. But when teachers can connect it to class material, it imbues a greater sense of purpose.
That resonates with Whitmore, the Wisconsin reading interventionist. This year, she’s working with a student on prefixes and suffixes, making explicit connections to the structures and meanings of words that the teenager will be learning in biology. Now when they see the word in class, Whitmore said, they’ll know how to break it apart.
Problem 3: Helping students access, and engage with, grade-level books
For decades, when students have struggled with reading comprehension, schools have responded by spending more time teaching comprehension strategies. But studies suggest that’s not the most effective approach, Strong said.
A 2023 metanalysis of 52 studies of students in grades 3-12 found that simply teaching more comprehension strategies didn’t make children better readers. Instead, they found that combining instruction in background knowledge with a few, powerful strategies—analyzing text structure and summarizing—moved the needle the furthest.
In practice, this could take a few different forms. To prepare students to read a tough grade-level text, teachers could first have them read a few easier texts on the same topic, building background knowledge, Strong said. Teachers can also show students how to use knowledge of different text structures to organize and remember information as they read, he said.
Getting older readers to engage in any of these activities is easier when they like the books they’re reading, said Angie Gemignani, a reading interventionist in the Holy Hill Area school district in Richfield, Wis.
This is especially important for students who have long been struggling readers. “If I’m working with a smaller group of kids, [I’m] thinking, OK, what are the interests of these kids?” she said.
Gemignani appreciates that the reading intervention program she uses, Strategic Adolescent Reading Intervention, or STARI, includes books that other kids in middle school would read in their general English/language arts classrooms.
“It’s things that their peers would absolutely read,” she said, “so it doesn’t make them feel ‘less than.’”
