A majority of teacher-preparation programs now give aspiring educators opportunities to practice all essential components of reading instruction—but many still train educators in outdated or discredited approaches, and relatively few prepare teachers to support struggling or non-native readers.
That’s the upshot of a new national review of reading in teacher preparation, released Tuesday as the latest in an ongoing series of analyses of university-based programs by the National Council on Teacher Quality. The nonprofit research and policy group grades preservice programs on the degree to which they include five foundational elements of reading—phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension—into their course materials, hours of instruction, assessments, and clinical practice time.
Since NCTQ’s last analysis in 2023, the share of programs that earned an A—meaning they included all five practices and no discredited practices—has more than doubled, from 26% to 53%. Less than a quarter of programs received an F, for using mostly outdated practices and giving future teachers little to no practice in scientifically-backed reading strategies, down from more than a third of prep programs in 2023.
The discredited practices include “three cueing,” which prompts students to use pictures and context when reading new words, rather than sounding out the words using phonics.
The report shows programs are making efforts to update training, but about 1 in 5 programs still use some outdated practices—even in states that have adopted and mandated so-called “science of reading” laws, a finding NCTQ President Heather Peske called “discouraging.”
“There are still thousands of teachers entering classrooms every year without the skills that we know work to teach reading—and we know those teachers want those skills,” she said.
NCTQ’s review looked at 700 teacher-preparation programs at colleges and universities leading to an initial license. The group did not review alternative teacher-preparation programs, such as short-term online or those aimed at career-switchers, so it’s not inclusive of every training route in the United States.
A panel of reading and assessment researchers and teacher-preparation faculty review syllabi, course materials, lectures, assignments, and field work for alignment with scientifically based reading instructional practices. They also considered whether teachers had at least one class session to practice instructional methods for each skill. The panel set seven hours minimum instruction needed in phonemic awareness, eight for phonics, four for fluency, six for vocabulary, and nine for comprehension instructional skills.
Each program had the opportunity to submit additional materials before NCTQ assigned a final A-F rating.
Forty-three of the 71 programs that opted out of the NCTQ review this year had previously earned an F in the group’s 2023 review. NCTQ analyzed textbooks assigned to specific classes in the programs that declined to participate, finding that they were significantly more likely to use materials that are not aligned with the science of reading.
Overall, NCTQ found that, of the foundational reading skills, aspiring educators are least likely to get practice in phonemic awareness—the ability to recognize and manipulate the sounds that make up spoken language. Only 65% of teacher-training programs included enough coverage of phonemic awareness; 7% ignored it entirely.
This skill is particularly important for students who have had limited verbal interaction in their early years, and those who are non-native English speakers, because infants learn to process sounds differently based on their native language.
In fact, NCTQ found 60% of teacher-preparation programs reviewed spent less than two hours on instructional practices for non-native English speakers. Only 16% of programs gave aspiring educators any practice in teaching the more than 5 million K-12 English learners to read. Similarly, only half of programs dedicated more than two hours to helping aspiring teachers specifically learn to support struggling readers, and little more than a quarter gave teachers the chance to practice this instructional support.
“Teacher quality is an essential ingredient in raising reading achievement,” said Timothy Shanahan, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, in a statement on the report. “Without sound preservice teacher preparation, there’ll always be a hole in that bucket: too many students being taught to read by too many underprepared or badly prepared teachers.”
State accountability may be driving updates
For more than a decade, teacher colleges have criticized NCTQ’s methodology—which relies on analysis of course syllabi, written materials, and assignments. But as more states have passed laws mandating the science of reading, similar requirements are being baked into state accountability.
States such as Indiana and Ohio, whose training programs rose significantly in the NCTQ’s ratings from 2023 to 2026, also recently implemented major statewide science of reading initiatives. In theory, that will help make the programs better and reduce the burden for states and districts, which have had to put hundreds of millions of dollars into professional development for teachers already in schools.
Over the past few years, more states have passed laws or implemented new policies related to evidence-based reading instruction. Look below to see which states have such legislation and when it passed.
Click here to learn more about each state’s legislation or policy.
Three years ago, Ohio’s legislature passed a massive reading-instruction overhaul. It set new requirements for programs and put $104 million into educator training and coaches and $64 million into curriculum and instructional materials to implement phonics-based instruction and bar whole-language approaches. The state explicitly forbids three-cueing.
Ohio State University’s undergraduate program received a B in the NCTQ’s 2023 and 2026 reviews, but its graduate program rating jumped from a D rating in 2023 to a B rating in 2026, an increase attributed in part to strong state accountability.
In December 2025, Ohio released the results of its first intensive audit of teacher-preparation programs under the new law. Auditors reviewed materials for every literacy-related course offered in every teacher-preparation program in the state; analyzed data from the programs’ learning-management systems such as Canvas or Blackboard; and observed classes.
"[State auditors] really could access everything about our courses,” said Shayne Piasta, a professor of reading and literacy in early and middle childhood at Ohio State University, who helped lead that university’s reading-curriculum overhaul. “It was a huge undertaking.”
In Ohio’s initial audit report in December 2025, Ohio State was sharply criticized. The university is known for historic ties to balanced-literacy programs including Reading Recovery and for several related approaches, like guided reading and Leveled Literacy Intervention, developed by OSU professors Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell. The university had 17 course sessions out of alignment, more than any other program in the state.
The audit spurred efforts to find and eliminate outdated practices like three-cueing that were still being taught, Piasta said.
“We are very much preparing our preservice teachers to provide instruction that aligns with the science of reading,” she said, “but we still had materials that had residual leftover from prior practices that we needed to really target. The de-implementation piece, which is really important, is also sometimes the hardest piece to manage and handle.”
For example, instructors tend to reuse the same textbooks or slide decks over several years without removing references to outdated instructional practices, she said.
The university held multiple virtual meetings this spring with more than 30 teacher-educators across five campuses to identify problem areas in the program’s curriculum and instruction. Piasta submitted a compliance report for the audit last week, which she said has updated all the courses previously out of alignment.
“It’s not like we can just change an entire course right away. Universities at this scale are not really designed to be nimble,” Piasta said. “The will to be able to come together like that can be challenging, but doing that is one of the key things that allowed us to make the progress that we’ve made.”
