(NewsNation) — Teachers around the country are noticing their students can’t read, and the culprit might be how reading is taught.

According to the results of the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP), two-thirds of U.S. fourth-graders are not at a proficient reading level.

“The kids can’t read – nobody wants to just say that,” said Kareem Weaver, an activist with the NAACP in Oakland, California, who has framed literacy as a civil rights issue.

Some early-grade educators have begun taking to TikTok to express their frustration and confusion over the state of reading education

Though some blame the COVID-19 pandemic for learning loss, others point out that the problem seems to go back much further.

A long-running debate over how to teach reading has largely been framed as phonics versus whole language, where phonics teaches students to read by breaking up words into small parts and having students sound out letters. It is a bottom-up approach, compared to whole language’s top-down approach where students are taught to recognize whole words rather than decode them.

Decades of research have revealed the most effective way to teach children to read incorporates phonics, phonemic awareness (associating sounds with letters and spoken words), fluency, vocabulary and comprehension, according to Real Clear Education. These five things together make up a philosophy of teaching named the “science of reading”

Despite overwhelming evidence that these tools together would teach over 90% of all students to read proficiently, the reading outcomes remain bleak.

At present, 72% of early-grade teachers “admit to using literacy instructional methods that have been debunked by cognitive scientists many years ago,” Real Clear Education reported.

These outdated methods include a style of teaching that leans heavily on contextual and meaning-based language, part of a system known as “balanced literacy,” which arose in the 1990s as a compromise between phonic and whole language.

This widely used teaching style allows students to essentially guess the word in front of them based on the image on the page or other context clues. For example, if a student came across the word “horse” and said “house,” the teacher would say that is incorrect, but if they said “pony,” it would be considered correct because of the relation of the two words.

In contrast to the small units taught in phonics, balanced literacy presents students with full books, calls for more independent reading time and fosters a love for reading through exposure to good material.

The modern method of balanced literacy education has its foundations in the teachings of Lucy Calkins, who founded Columbia’s Teachers College Reading and Writing Project in 1981. Calkins trained thousands of teachers, eventually becoming synonymous with balanced literacy.

But in May 2022, Calkins announced a major reversal, acknowledging that phonics achieved better outcomes, and her unit at Columbia University was closed.

While phonics has ultimately come out on top of whole language in the fight over reading education, experts argue phonics alone cannot be the be-all and end-all. Many point to the “science of reading” as the solution, but a lack of implementation and standardization is allowing millions of students around the country to fall behind.