Why Are Schools Switching from Orton-Gillingham?

Full Webinar Transcript

The reading wars, and why traditional phonics keeps losing (0:00)

Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I'm Tzippy Rav-Noy, co-founder of CAPIT Learning. Today's session is "We Switched from OG to Sound-to-Print, and Here's What Happened"—a look at this crucial shift in reading instruction and the outcomes that follow. We're fortunate to be joined by two educators who made this transition from two different vantage points: Dr. Jimmy Gouard, principal of St. Louis Catholic School in Texas, on school-level implementation, and Nicole Valnes, curriculum director at Yankton School District in South Dakota, on the district level.

Before they share their stories, let me explain the Sound-to-Print method. We're all familiar with the reading crisis—it's been with us for decades. Sixty-nine percent of students read below proficiency, and it's not for lack of trying. Districts spend millions on literacy every year, yet proficiency rates aren't improving.

The common explanation is that schools haven't fully embraced the science of reading and have relied too long on whole language and balanced literacy. But there's a problem with that story: phonics wasn't invented yesterday. It's been around for centuries.

The reading wars between phonics and the whole-word approach have been waging for 150 years—America's longest-standing war. If phonics is the answer, why hasn't it won? If it were truly sufficient, it would have made a mockery of the whole-word approach, the way free markets defeated communism in a few decades. But it hasn't. We need to ask ourselves why.

My argument today is that traditional phonics comes with a serious flaw—one that prevents many students from learning to read, and has prolonged the reading wars for over a century. The flaw is the starting point. Traditional phonics starts with letters. It points to a letter and pretends the letter can talk. This is the print-to-sound method: start with a letter, then move to the sounds it makes.

This creates confusion because in English, letters make far too many sounds. The letter A alone makes the sound in apple, in acorn, in father, in above. That makes English seem unpredictable and undecodable—which is exactly why reading instruction is crammed with rules, exceptions, sight words, syllable types, and so on. All those strategies exist to patch over the confusion that starts the moment you pretend letters can talk.

What Sound-to-Print is, and why it works (3:30)

There's a better approach—one that makes English logical and decodable. It's called Sound-to-Print, or Linguistic Phonics.

Sound-to-Print teaches kids that letters don't make sounds. Teachers prove it: they hold a book up to their ear and ask, do I hear anything? No—because letters don't talk. People do.

So instead of teaching that letters talk, we begin with what children already know how to do: speak. We start with the sounds in their mouth, not the letters on the page. Students learn all 40+ sounds we make when we speak, and all the different ways those sounds can be spelled.

On our sound chart, the sounds are on the left, and their spellings are on the right. Take the /s/ sound—it has seven spelling patterns: Sam, saxophone, house, city, and so on. We start with the sound, then move to the spellings. Students learn to read by learning all the sounds and all their possible spellings—and that's it. This makes English as logical, consistent, and decodable as Hebrew, Spanish, or Finnish.

To summarize the two methods: traditional phonics (print-to-sound) starts with letters as the primary unit, teaches that letters make arbitrary sounds and sometimes stay silent, and leaves students perceiving the language as confusing and inconsistent, which forces all that memorizing of sight words and rules, and leaves too many kids behind. Linguistic Phonics (Sound-to-Print) starts with the spoken language students already know. Letters are introduced as a code for sounds that already exist in the student's mind. Sounds map systematically to print, English becomes decodable, and that clarity works across all three tiers of instruction—not just Tier 1.

This was personal for me. I was an English learner who struggled with reading, and my two older children struggled for years. Discovering Sound-to-Print was a breakthrough—and I wanted to bring it to every student. So we created CAPIT Reading to ensure all kids learn to read from the start, and to help older struggling readers catch up quickly.

The evidence: Johns Hopkins, ESSA, and year-over-year growth (6:00)

Bringing a new methodology to market wasn't easy—but things changed a few years ago when the team at Johns Hopkins University reached out to research our Sound-to-Print methodology. They've already published two studies showing the method works, earning us an ESSA Tier 2 rating on Evidence for ESSA, with a third study underway.

Here's what happens when students learn with Sound-to-Print year after year. One school implements CAPIT starting in 3-year-old PreK. Their baseline started at zero—these students arrived with no reading knowledge. After one year, entering 4PK, they began at 25% toward their 4PK goal, and by January, they were 98% there, with many already working on kindergarten skills. The kindergartners, who had two prior years of CAPIT, started at a 61% baseline and reached 94% toward grade-level goals by January, many working in first and second grade. The first graders entered at a 74% baseline and hit 90% by January. This is what we call prevention instead of intervention.

Dr. Jimmy Gouard, Principal—St. Louis Catholic School, Texas (8:30)

Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Dr. Jimmy Gouard, principal at St. Louis Catholic School in Castroville, Texas, near San Antonio. I've been in education for over 40 years—I even retired once from the public school system—so I've watched a lot of teachers try to teach reading over the years.

We've used CAPIT here for the last seven years. I brought it with me because I'd seen it at a previous school I'd taken over mid-year—a school that was "improvement required" in Texas, meaning it was struggling in reading and math. We used CAPIT with third, fourth, and fifth graders, because it was a low-income school and the kids needed a lot of help. Within three or four months, when they took the statewide assessment, many of them passed for the first time in their entire elementary careers. I attribute that to the teachers working hard with the program.

When I came to St. Louis Catholic, I asked: Why can't we use this with three- and four-year-olds, instead of just five- and six-year-olds? My staff assured me they could. We start them on the CAPIT song and the tablets, and after the first couple of months, they roll into the PreK lessons. By the time they move into 4K, they've already been exposed to it, and they take off.

My teachers and parents are very proud, because it works. In the Archdiocese of San Antonio, there are 35 elementary schools—and we've been the top elementary school on the NWEA MAP assessments, kindergarten through fifth grade, for about four years running. It works, as long as you have a dedicated staff that works the program—and the kids love it. We tie it to monthly reading goals and rewards.

Nicole Valnes, Curriculum Director—Yankton School District, South Dakota (14:30)

I'm Nicole Valnes, curriculum director for the Yankton School District in South Dakota. We serve preschool through 12th grade, and—uncommon in South Dakota—we have a free preschool program, so we start CAPIT with our three-year-olds.

We found CAPIT through our Title I program, which I also oversee. We were seeing a gap: students below kindergarten level, really struggling with letters and sounds. The approach we were using was print-to-sound. One of my Title I teachers shared CAPIT with us, and we piloted it with a few students starting in mid-February, just for the last few months of the year. Like Dr. Gouard, we saw results within weeks.

One student stands out—I wrote the numbers down so I'd get them right. After winter break in January, she knew about 15 letters and 3 sounds. After roughly four weeks with CAPIT, one of our first progress-monitoring points showed 24 of 26 letters and 22 sounds, with her automaticity rate jumping from 3 per minute to 17. Her NWEA score in foundational skills went from the 3rd percentile in the winter to the 74th by the end of the year.

When you get results like that, word spreads fast. Soon, classroom teachers wanted in, so we piloted across preschool, junior K, kindergarten, first grade, and Title I. We've since opened a brand-new early-childhood school—preschool through kindergarten—where we implement CAPIT school-wide, and we use it in our ELL room and with Title I students. Almost every week, I get an email from another teacher who's heard about CAPIT and wants it too. I have one in my inbox today.

One moment that stuck with me: we tell teachers that Sound-to-Print is also a shift in how they talk to students—how they present the sounds, to eliminate confusion. We had a student who used to say, "I can't." After the shift, instead of "I can't," that student said, "Can you help me?"The kids even started changing the way they talk.

I think it's catching on because the data is so immediate. Most instructional changes take time to show results. With CAPIT, we see them right away.

Q&A and what's next (21:30)

We had a question asking whether we'd demo the lessons in action. Because this session was so popular and we wouldn't be able to do it justice in a few minutes, we're dedicating a Part 2 to exactly that: "We Switched from OG to Sound-to-Print—Here's What It Looks Like in the Classroom," featuring teachers and a real classroom walkthrough.