Northern New Jersey Mensa is offering some free resources for teaching reading. We want to make it easier for parents, teachers, and literacy volunteers to teach reading to children and adults. We want New Jersey to have the best schools in the country. We are now facing some surprising competition: from Mississippi!

Mississippi and Louisiana had always vied for an embarrassing title: the worst-performing public schools in the United States. Yet today, Mississippi is a beacon for other states to follow. While scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress examinations (given in 4^th, 8^th, and 12^th grade) have been falling nationwide, they have been skyrocketing in Mississippi. Mississippi’s 4^th-grade reading scores rose from 49^th in 2013 to 9^th in 2024. The NAEP results for some noteworthy subgroups of 4^th graders are particularly impressive[i]:

• African-American students: Mississippi ranked 3^rd nationwide for reading and math.
• Hispanic students: Mississippi ranked first for reading and second for math scores.
• Economically disadvantaged students: Mississippi ranked first for reading and second for math.

This “Mississippi miracle” is the predictable result of using an evidence-based approach to teaching reading and mathematics. It has also created an embarrassing situation for us in New Jersey. These results mean that Mississippi is doing a better job of teaching reading to poor and Hispanic students than we New Jerseyans are! Inspired and challenged by Mississippi’s achievements, Northern New Jersey Mensa has launched its own literacy initiative. Since 1875, New Jersey’s constitution has required the state government to provide a “thorough and efficient” system of free public schools. To help our schools become more efficient, Northern New Jersey Mensa’s website offers free, downloadable resources that make it easy to teach reading. Any parent or teacher (or volunteer at a literacy program) can download and use these resources.

Understanding Educational Policy

To understand why some educational systems work better than others, it’s important to know the following three models of educational policy:

• Puritan New England
• The Ante-Bellum South
• The “Progressive” Movement

The Puritans who founded Massachusetts Bay Colony wanted every human being to learn to read well enough to understand Holy Scripture and the laws of the Commonwealth. In the 1640s, they passed laws requiring every child to be taught to read and every town to hire teachers. Not only did the Puritans establish free public schools, they used an effective tool, The New England Primer, which taught children to sound out words letter by letter (phonics). As a result, practically everyone who grew up in Massachusetts learned to read.

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In contrast, the founders of Virginia wanted to recreate a version of the feudal system, with education reserved for aristocrats. In 1671, Governor William Berkeley wrote to the House of Lords, “I thank God there are no free schools nor printing [in Virginia]; for learning has brought disobedience and heresy … and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both.” The Southern states even passed laws making it illegal to teach any black person to read and write. Those racist laws became null and void after the ratification of the 13th Amendment (which abolished slavery) and the 14th Amendment (granting equal protection under the law). Nevertheless, many states set up segregated schools, which provided inferior education to black students.

The Progressive Era (1890s to 1920s) was a time of multiple political and social reform movements, many of which were good. However, a few “Progressive” policies did great harm. One of the worst was a bad method of reading instruction first introduced in Massachusetts in the 1830s. Until the disestablishment of the Congregational Church in 1833, Massachusetts public schools were run by local Congregational churches. Afterward, the schools came under the control of the State Board of Education, whose first secretary was Horace Mann. Mann did some good things, such as banning corporal punishment. However, he introduced a disastrously ineffective method of teaching reading. Instead of learning how to sound words out from left to right, children were expected to recognize whole words, as shapes. The results were so disastrous that 31 Boston schoolmasters in 1845 published a book to explain the problem.[ii] Yet Mann had the last laugh because he hand-picked the people who were to teach in the normal schools (teacher training schools).

I put the word “Progressive” in scare quotes because it often refers to strategies and tactics that were intended to prevent children from progressing. Decent people typically support universal education as a social good. However, the owners of the textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts in the 1830s and 1840s became vexed that “Lowell girls” who worked in the mills could speak and write so well that many people were siding with these young women in labor disputes.

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From the mill owners’ perspective, the goal of educational “reform” was to find some way for the state to go through the motions of providing Puritan-style universal free public schooling while having future mill hands learn remarkably little. The whole-word method is tailor-made for that purpose. Like many criminals, the whole-word approach to teaching reading has gone under many aliases, including look-say, sight words, or reading for meaning. It is also the basis of the whole language, balanced literacy, and leveled literacy curricula.

To understand the Progressive Movement, you need to understand its conjoined twin: the Efficiency Movement. This was an attempt by wealthy people to find and eliminate waste and inefficiency in all areas of society. Yet waste and efficiency are relativistic concepts. (For example, to save the lives of people who don’t matter to you, you may have to “waste” money on safety equipment.) The industrialists who supported the Efficiency Movement wanted to externalize costs (e.g., by shifting much of the cost of training their workforce to local taxpayers). They wanted the educational system to produce an adequate supply of competent professionals (e.g., doctors, lawyers, engineers) and clerical workers but without giving the common rabble the kind of enlightenment that would make them unruly. (Before the rise of the public relations industry, wealthy industrialists used to admit this in public.) As a result, many wealthy “philanthropists” have supported efforts to “dumb down” the public schools, while sending their own children to elite private schools.

This attempt by political elites to ration education, despite the voters’ desire for excellent public schools for all, explains why so many prominent “educators” have championed ineffective methods of teaching reading. The most prominent figure in the Progressive movement in education was John Dewey, who owed his career to Rockefeller philanthropy. In 1898, Dewey referred to reading instruction as a “fetich,” complaining “The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early school life because of the great importance attaching to literature seems to me a perversion.”[iii] Other “Progressive” educators claimed to support literacy but championed the “sight word” method, which caused epidemics of “congenital word blindness” (now called dyslexia.[iv]

Education in New Jersey

In New Jersey, we value education. We New Jerseyans vote for high school taxes. Yet we don’t always get what we pay for. Remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic allowed parents to observe their children’s schooling. Afterward, many New Jerseyans were outraged by what they learned from the “Sold a Story” podcast, which exposed the folly of the sight-word method.[v] In response to those revelations and the decline in school performance during the pandemic, the New Jersey legislature passed important legislation to improve reading instruction. Yet implementation of the new policies can be uneven, especially since we have 593 school districts in New Jersey!

Teaching Basic Reading

Northern New Jersey Mensa wants to make teaching reading as easy as A, B, C. Here are some simple steps for helping struggling readers:

• Check the child’s vision and hearing. A simple screening may reveal that the student needs glasses or hearing aids.
• Have the child write the alphabet from A to Z, in capital and lowercase letters. Many parents are stunned to find that their supposedly dyslexic child has simply never learned the alphabet.
• Teach phonics explicitly by showing how letters represent speech sounds, then reinforce that skill through spelling practice. Once the child can sound out words, Noah Webster’s classic spelling book is an excellent next step. Teaching spelling is teaching reading!
• Expand vocabulary by reading aloud together or exploring illustrated word books such as those by Richard Scarry.

Building Comprehension

Phonics and spelling lessons enable children to recognize words in print. But to develop good reading comprehension, you need to know what the individual words mean. To decipher complicated sentences, you need to learn the principles of grammar. The neglect of grammar lessons leads to poor reading comprehension, illogical thinking, and needless difficulty in learning foreign languages.

Our Literacy Outreach

Northern New Jersey Mensa’s literacy initiative provides resources to support each stage of this progression: phonics primers such as Hazel Loring’s Blend Phonics, Noah Webster’s classic American Spelling Book, a chapter from David Mulroy’s The War Against Grammar, and additional materials on vocabulary-building, logic, rhetoric, and the importance of background knowledge. Together, these tools form a practical approach for helping children move from decoding words to truly understanding text.

Our local group members have begun sharing these resources widely, introducing the project to parents and teachers across the community. We have printed business cards: one side has a QR code that links to our literacy resources, the other side explains Mensa’s mission. We are also working on materials to present at school board meetings, libraries, and other community events.

The idea is simple: Teaching reading should be as easy as A, B, C. By helping teachers, parents, and literacy volunteers access clear, time-tested teaching tools, Mensa members are using their intelligence to serve the public, one of Mensa’s founding goals.

This project illustrates the important role that Mensans can play in a democratic society. Only 2% of the population is eligible for Mensa membership. Thus, Mensans can never become a powerful voting bloc. Yet as we Mensans are drawn from the smartest 2% of the population, we can (and should) take leadership roles within our communities, teaching and inspiring people to work together to solve stubborn problems.

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[i] Mississippi’s 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Available at: https://www.mdek12.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/59/2025/01/NAEPRankings-OnePager-2025-0115-JC-v02.pdf.

[ii] Penitential Tears; or A Cry from the Dust, by “the Thirty-One” prostrated and pulverized by the hand of Horace Mann, Secretary, &c. Boston, MA: C. Stimpson Inc. Available at: https://ia601307.us.archive.org/25/items/penitentialtears00with/penitentialtears00with.pdf.

[iii] Dewey, John: The Primary-Education Fetich. Forum, Vol. XXV, May 1898, Pages 315 to 328. Available at: 181591329-john-dewey-s-plan-to-dumb-down-america-the-primary-education-fetich-forum-1898.pdf

[iv] Orton, Samuel T. The “sight reading” method of teaching reading as a source of reading disability. Journal of Educational Psychology, February, 1929.  Available at: http://www.donpotter.net/pdf/orton-sight-reading-method.pdf.

[v] Hanford, Emily: Sold a Story [podcast], 2023. Available at: https://emilyhanford.com/sold-a-story.