The Woman Winning the Reading Wars

Louisa Moats was at a conference in Daphne, Ala., earlier this year when she was approached by a group of teachers. For the 81-year-old, this was a relatively new occurrence. “They’re poorly paid, they don’t look very healthy, they certainly didn’t have an elite education and I feel this concern and admiration for them as they do this job,” she says, with her characteristic frankness. “They come up to me, with this glazed, starry-eyed look, and thank me as if I, personally, was the conduit to their renewed sense of purpose and competence. I get that a lot now.”Moats has become a late-in-life heroine, at least in some circles, because of a teacher-training program she wrote decades ago that has become a buzzy property. She is not exactly basking in the attention. “I take it with a grain of salt,” she says, sitting in her remote Vermont lake house. “Behind that is my sense that what I would want them to do is probably not exactly what’s going on in their classroom, but it’s a reasonable enough approximation that it’s making a difference for kids.”Her skepticism can be forgiven. For a long time, Moats found herself on the losing side of America’s so-called reading wars, the back-and-f...