Reading Recovery organization confronts financial difficulties

The organization that supports Reading Recovery teachers nationwide is facing serious financial challenges after states have pulled support and hundreds of school districts have dropped the controversial tutoring program in recent years.  

The Reading Recovery Council of North America (RRCNA) is the professional association for educators trained in Reading Recovery, a one-on-one intervention program for first graders who are far behind in reading. For more than 30 years, the nonprofit has offered training, sought government funding and defended the program from attacks on its teaching philosophy.  

RRCNA’s financial struggles come as a dozen states have effectively banned the instructional approach associated with Reading Recovery. The strategies — known as “cueing” or sometimes “three-cueing” for the three different clues it teaches kids to rely on — have been contradicted by 40 years of scientific research on reading. APM Reports released a series of stories and a podcast that outlined the problems with the teaching method.  

Critics have long argued that Reading Recovery teaches kids to figure out words from context — an ineffective strategy that struggling readers rely on — rather than sounding them out. The lead author of a 2023 study suggested that technique may explain why Reading Recovery students’ initial progress in catching up didn’t last; they ended up scoring worse by third and fourth grade than similarly low-performing classmates. 

Since Sold a Story came out in late 2022, cueing bans have threatened RRCNA’s presence across the United States, from Texas and Florida to Minnesota and Wisconsin. Kentucky eliminated state funding for an organization that had trained Reading Recovery teachers. And South Carolina no longer allows teachers to use Reading Recovery training to help satisfy their certification requirements. 

Now, with its reach diminishing, RRCNA is spending a lot of money to defend itself. The organization hired a consulting firm to design a campaign to rebut Sold a Story, and it filed a lawsuit against its home state of Ohio to block one of those cueing bans.  

“We’re trying to continue to expand out the positive work we do. But at the same time, we’ve got to protect our flank,” Billy Molasso, RRCNA’s executive director, said during an online forum in February. “And when people are coming after you, it’s hard to do both of those.” 

A review of recent tax returns showed RRCNA has been relying on its cash reserves. Since the middle of 2021, it has spent close to $1.3 million more than it’s raised.  

Teachers weren’t renewing their memberships and attending the annual conference at the rates they had in the past, said Michael Lemaster, RRCNA’s former chief financial officer. Even a longtime supporter, the educational publisher Heinemann, pulled back on its conference sponsorship, he said.  

Lemaster, who served as the organization’s CFO for 22 years before he was laid off last year, said RRCNA hadn’t come up with sustainable revenue sources to make up the difference. 

His claim is supported by the organization’s tax filings. An APM Reports analysis found conference revenue was at its height in 2019, when the organization pulled in $1.7 million. Four years later, RRCNA received only $1.1 million from the annual conference. And membership revenue is down by about two-thirds compared to what it was a decade ago. 

Laurie Styron, the executive director of CharityWatch, a group that evaluates nonprofit governance, examined RRCNA’s audited financial statements. She said that if the organization theoretically didn’t raise another penny of revenue, it would have only a few months’ worth of reserves left in the bank. 

Styron said RRCNA is facing added difficulties because most charities don’t have to worry about a new law that could shut down their work in a state. “So this is a pretty unique situation in that regard,” Styron said. “This really is an existential issue for the organization.” 

RRCNA might have run out of cash already were it not for a major donation from Gay Su Pinnell, Lemaster said. Pinnell is a retired professor from The Ohio State University who helped bring Reading Recovery to America in the early 1980s and then co-founded RRCNA in 1993. As the nonprofit’s first board president, she had compared RRCNA’s work to “building a cathedral.” In 2020, she committed more than $1 million to the organization, Lemaster said. 

“Gay Su Pinnell is the Reading Recovery Council of North America, essentially,” Lemaster said. “Without her, this would have probably ended already. At least, we would have been on life support anyway.” 

Cleaning up the literacy landscape

Lemaster said that RRCNA paid nearly $500,000 to consultants who advised it on an ad campaign to address what it saw as negative news coverage by APM Reports and other outlets.  

In 2021, the organization hired Kivvit, a Chicago-based public affairs firm with offices all over the country. Kivvit did not respond to an email requesting comment. But Leslie McBane, a former president of RRCNA’s board, wrote in the Reading Recovery Journal that the strategists would help Reading Recovery craft “a concise, compelling message for the public,” do a “deep dive into opposition research,” and help the organization battle “misinformation and oversimplification.”  

“Together, we are engaged in cleaning up the literacy landscape,” McBane wrote in a 2022 article. “We may not be able to attend to every piece of detracting information, but we are able to achieve much as we combine our efforts.” 

The following year, RRCNA and six other Reading Recovery-affiliated organizations issued what they called a joint international statement responding to Sold a Story. They said the podcast presented “a misinterpretation” of the research behind Reading Recovery and “a distortion of the facts,” with “quotes taken out of context.” RRCNA also released a series of what it described as fact-checks in writing and on video.  

RRCNA also sued the state of Ohio and Gov. Mike DeWine last October with the goal of overturning new legislation about reading instruction. Its suit argues that Ohio legislators should not have tucked new education policy into a wide-ranging budget bill. It also argues the law infringes on state and local school boards’ authority and doesn’t specify what it means to ban “three-cueing.” 

RRCNA said in its legal complaint that the cueing ban had already caused a decline in the organization’s Ohio membership numbers. The organization also predicted that the law would reduce the number of people registering for its conferences. The new law “materially undermines RRCNA’s ability to carry out its fundamental mission and outreach to constituencies in Ohio and elsewhere,” the complaint said. 

“The Ohio General Assembly was sold a story on the value of the science of reading movement and ignored the expertise of dedicated Ohio educators and literacy researchers,” Molasso said in a press release. “RRCNA will fight for evidence-based reading instruction as defined by educators and research, not politicians and corporate interests.” 

RRCNA’s case has primarily focused on an alleged violation of Ohio’s one-subject rule, a constitutional provision that prohibits legislators from including two unrelated items in one bill. Courts have struck down legislation that violated this rule before, but more recently, Ohio’s state Supreme Court has shown more deference to legislators’ decisions, said Steven Steinglass, the former dean of Cleveland State University College of Law. 

Steinglass added that a budget bill is full of provisions that tell the state how to spend money, and he doesn’t think the Ohio Supreme Court would say such an order is a violation of the one-subject rule. 

A spokesperson for Gov. DeWine told the Columbus Dispatch that lawmakers had the power to make policy changes related to reading instruction. “The governor is obviously very passionate that this moves forward," the spokesperson, Dan Tierney, told the paper. 

RRCNA is currently seeking a preliminary injunction to block the law before districts have to start using state-approved curricula next school year. The case could go to trial in late October. 

Molasso, RRCNA’s executive director, declined an interview request. He said at the February forum that RRCNA’s attempt to overturn Ohio’s law could be a test case for challenging bans in other states. “If it fails here, that gives us hope for other places,” he said. 

But the legal action may not change how the organization is viewed by education leaders. School districts across the country have been turning away from the program. A decade after RRCNA’s founding, Reading Recovery was being taught in every state — with roughly 3,200 school systems reportedly using the intervention. But as of last school year, only about 550 districts were still using it. 

Administrators in Charles County, Maryland, for example, concluded they could help more struggling readers with a different approach. A spokesperson told APM Reports that their assessment data showed 92% of the district’s students who were in Reading Recovery remained below grade level in reading.  

Additional reporting by Emily Haavik.