Reading Recovery, a one-on-one tutoring program, helps first graders catch up with their classmates, but by third or fourth grade they’re doing worse than similar students who weren’t tutored, according to a new, federally funded study.

Millions of students have participated in the program since 1984, when it came to the U.S. from New Zealand, write Emily Hanford and Christopher Peak on APM Reports. Yet, it’s “based on a theory about how people read words that was disproven decades ago by cognitive scientists.”

A 2019 story by APM Reports helped bring widespread public attention to the fact that reading programs based on this theory teach kids the habits of Struggling Readers.

Critics of Reading Recovery have long contended that children in the program do not receive enough explicit and systematic instruction in how to decode words. In addition, they say, children are taught to use context, pictures, and other clues to identify words, a strategy that may work in first-grade books but becomes less effective as text becomes more difficult. They say kids can seem like good readers in first grade but fail to develop the skills they need to be good readers in the long run.

(Researcher Henry) May said this could be what is happening. “If you don’t build up those decoding skills, you’re going to fall behind, even though it looked like you had caught up in first grade.”

Reading Recovery is very expensive, costing up to $10,271 per student, write Hanford and Peak. Advocates claim children who are tutored won’t need additional help later on. But the study found the Reading Recovery graduates were more likely than the control group to need further reading intervention.