How one teacher’s struggle to save her son led her to take on Oregon’s reading crisis.
By James Neff
Oregon Journalism Project
- Ronda Fritz transformed from a disheartened Oregon teacher using debunked “whole language” methods into a pioneer of evidence-based “science of reading” instruction after failing to help her dyslexic son.
- After earning a doctorate, she reformed Eastern Oregon University’s teacher preparation program and established a reading clinic that has trained more than 700 educators in evidence-based reading methods.
- Fritz’s efforts have raised the university’s education program to the top in the state, directly addressing a systemic failure in training teachers to combat Oregon’s abysmal literacy rates.
LA GRANDE — A few years into her dream job as an elementary schoolteacher in her tiny hometown of North Powder (pop. 563), Ronda Fritz found herself disheartened. Not by the low pay or lack of resources at her tiny school.
In line with Oregon’s Early Literacy Success Initiative, the Reading Clinic, supported by the Schuberth/Urang Family, has launched its groundbreaking online teacher training program, “Building a Strong Foundation in Literacy.” This innovative program, designed to equip educators across Oregon with essential literacy education training, commenced in January 2024.
EOU/Michael K. Dakota photo
Rather, Fritz blamed herself for failing each year to teach all of her students how to read. It was 1998, when reading scores in Oregon had already begun to slide. Despite her best efforts, the strategies she learned at Boise State University’s College of Education weren’t working, and her colleagues didn’t have any answers either.
“Maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a teacher,” Fritz would tell herself, and struggled with a decision that nearly half of Oregon teachers make early in their careers: to hang it up and find another profession.
Complicating her dilemma was a boy in another classroom, a sturdy, blond-haired third grader named Trent who could not read. Trent was Ronda’s son.
Fritz wrestled over the decision with her husband, Shane, who had just started nursing school. She decided to keep teaching. Plus, she needed to figure out her son’s learning problems and advocate for him at his school.
What followed was a journey that would challenge Oregon’s literacy orthodoxy, a now-discredited set of beliefs largely responsible for the state’s worst-in-the-nation ranking for fourth grade reading proficiency. Along the way, Fritz lifted Eastern Oregon University’s teacher prep program to the top rank in the state and has equipped more than 700 student and in-service teachers with the tools to combat one the state’s most urgent crises.
Fritz’s story illustrates a key finding of the Oregon Journalism Project’s ongoing series “Oregon Schools: What Went Wrong”: the state’s abdication of its responsibility to ensure that Oregon universities adequately train educators to teach reading.
In the face of widespread resistance to the science of reading, Fritz has been “a driving force for literacy” and “the pioneer to really push change statewide,” said Tania McKey, former senior director of humanities for Portland Public Schools and education professor at Portland State University.
Almost brainwashed
By third grade, Fritz was already an avid reader when her family moved back to Eastern Oregon from Alaska, where her father had worked on oil pipelines to earn the money to buy a 180-acre spread near North Powder in Union County. She became the first person in her family to earn a bachelor’s degree—in elementary education in 1992.
Like many of her general education colleagues, Fritz had been trained in the now-debunked philosophy of “whole language,” and later “balanced literacy,” that had swept teacher preparation programs in Oregon and elsewhere in the 1980s and 1990s. It focused on children being immersed in “meaningful texts” rather than learning to sound out words, which many believed was anathema to developing a child’s “love of reading” and even counterproductive. Instead, they were taught to “read” unfamiliar words by taking cues from pictures, a word’s first letter, or sentence structures, typically in unchallenging books “leveled” to their current reading ability.
Today, 54% of U.S. adults read below a sixth grade level and 21% are illiterate, according to studies.
To better understand their son’s challenges, Fritz and her husband took Trent, then a third grader, to Portland for a full neuropsychological workup.
When doctors returned their diagnosis — mild attention deficit disorder and severe dyslexia — Fritz didn’t buy it.
“Because of my teacher training, I was very skeptical about the dyslexia diagnosis,” she said. Indeed, for much of the 20th century, psychologists and educators believed dyslexia was extremely rare.
“I can’t even describe how almost brainwashed I was to believe the people who I had learned from who told me dyslexia wasn’t a real thing, that there really wasn’t anything we could do about it,” Fritz said. “So I kind of clung to that for far too long.”
That would change. Several years later, she went to an International Reading Association conference in Portland and out of curiosity attended the lone seminar on dyslexia, which was taught by Susan Barton, a pioneer in the field. “By the time that was over, to be honest, I was in tears,” Fritz said. “The way she described dyslexia and the symptoms were 100% my son.”
Fritz also learned that the best methods to teach reading to all children, including those with dyslexia, had been validated by researchers decades earlier. Learning to read requires the brain’s visual cortex to adapt in order to recognize written text. Research, including brain imaging, found that repeated direct instruction in letter-sound relationships, or phonics, more effectively developed the brain’s early reading circuitry than memorizing whole words.
At first, Fritz was angry that she and her colleagues hadn’t been taught this at Boise State. But then she immersed herself in research-based, structured literacy practices known as the “science of reading.” She became the reading specialist at her elementary school and got permission during a free period to tutor Trent, then 15, at North Powder High School just across the street.
By the time he graduated, Trent had made strides. But Fritz still bears a mother’s grief. “I could have made such a difference with him if I had known about this when he was 4 or 5,” she said. “I know it changed the trajectory of his life.”
That realization would change her trajectory, too.
‘What could I have been?’
The cost of failing to teach Oregon students to read is often measured in economic terms: wages lost over a lifetime of underemployment, the collective drag on the state’s economy, the increased likelihood of ending up in prison. Those metrics fail to account for its emotional toll on tens of thousands of Oregon children and families.
“Oh, I hated school,” Trent Fritz said. “It was like a nightmare. It would have been a disaster if a teacher had called on me to read in front of the class.”
To deal with the anxiety, he developed coping strategies. “I would ‘forget my book’ in trying to avoid those situations.”
He said he knew he wasn’t dumb, and he wasn’t teased or mocked by his classmates. He was quiet, well-behaved, and had a good group of friends but still felt ashamed to seek the classroom help he was legally entitled to. Because of his reading disability, he received an extra 20 minutes to take a written test if needed.
“I would rather just go ahead and get a D or fail the test than go to the front of the class and say that I needed help,” Trent said.
He was good in math and science until it required being able to read closer to grade level.
After high school, “I shaped my entire life in a way to avoid the things I struggle with,” he said.
Trent sought jobs that required little reading and writing, from working at a Boise construction firm that built roads to toiling 14 days on, seven days off in North Dakota oil fields during its fracking boom. At 25, he settled back in Oregon as a maintenance worker with the state Department of Transportation.
“What could I have been?” he wonders. “It’s definitely something I question as an adult.”
Teaching turnaround
When her two children finished high school, Fritz could have continued teaching reading.
Instead, she earned a special education doctorate in literacy from the University of Oregon in 2016. That was three years after Mississippi instituted a statewide literacy program that would bring its statewide reading scores from the bottom to the top of the country using a science of reading program.
Fritz landed a job at Eastern Oregon University, in La Grande, as an assistant professor in general education. The education college was still firmly in the now-discredited whole language literacy camp, and got lousy marks from the National Council on Teacher Quality on how well its courses prepared aspiring teachers to teach reading. She was determined to turn that around.
“I wanted to come back and retrain teachers so that they don’t feel the way I had to feel,” Fritz said. “It was about my son, but it was also about all of these children that I had failed for years just because I didn’t know.”
The professor overseeing Eastern’s literacy courses told Fritz during the COVID pandemic that her second grade daughter was struggling to read. Fritz offered to tutor her for free. After the girl quickly achieved grade level and became an enthusiastic reader, her mother realized Fritz had the better credentials to shape and oversee the initial teacher prep courses in literacy as well as the 24 hours of coursework for those seeking to add a reading intervention endorsement to their state license. Fritz revised the coursework to align with the science of reading.
“She was really the first professor in Oregon who said, ‘We have to do this,’” McKey, now an education professor at Alabama A&M, said. “People were disagreeing with her, and she just continued: ‘I know what’s best for kids. I’m going to do this work.’”
Before long, the National Council on Teacher Quality gave Eastern Oregon’s undergraduate program an A for its reading program; the other Oregon state teacher programs earned grades ranging from C to F.
In 2021, Fritz founded The Reading Clinic at Eastern Oregon, a grant-supported program that provided free tutoring to K–3 students in the La Grande area using student educators and in-service teachers. The clinic took Fritz’s science of reading training and applied its lessons in short, one-on-one and small pullout sessions. So far, the clinic has trained more than 700 current and future teachers.
“It’s a drop in the bucket,” Fritz said, when you consider the state’s urgent needs. She points to Mississippi, which raised its fourth grade reading scores to first in the nation with state reading coaches who not only retrained thousands of teachers and principals, but traveled to schools and districts where lagging test scores showed help was needed.
Fritz, 56, is officially retiring from university teaching on June 30 but will work on raising money and expanding the clinic’s work as far as she can.
Family tradition
Today, Trent Fritz, 38, and his wife, Tricia, an occupational therapist, have two boys, Dallin, 5, and Kasem, 8, and live in Island City north of La Grande.
On a recent day, Dallin, a kindergartner at Island City Elementary, sat in the family room at a low, blond-wood table with bright blue and red slats on its tiny matching chairs. His grandmother perched on a chair across from him, put a sturdy dry-erase sheet facing him. It was 4:30 pm, time for his 20-minute tutoring session.
Reading disorders have a strong genetic correlation, and Trent noted that his father and grandfather on his mother’s side also struggled with reading. Dallin had shown a couple of markers in preschool that he might be at risk.
“The earlier we can intervene and make sure he’s reading at grade level, I think the better chance he’s got of not hating school,” Trent said.
Fritz asked her grandson to sound out “bug.” He said buh..uh…guh and lined up three tiny blocks, one for each sound. Then he used a black marker to spell it out in lowercase letters on the sheet, but wrote a “d” instead of a “b.”
She cued him with a memory device that described the shape of the letter: “bat before the ball.”
Dallin saw his mistake, erased the “d” with a finger, and printed a neat “b.” “Good,” she said, and Dallin smiled.
Later, Trent said his mom told him Dallin was reading at about grade level. That was always the plan. “I just don’t want him to be a grown man before he realizes he’s smart.”
More in the series:
Schooled by Mississippi Dec. 8, 2025
Leaving It Up to Local Control Impedes Oregon’s Much-Needed Reading Rescue Jan. 29, 2026
Oregon’s Education Workforce Climbed While Student Enrollment Slid Feb. 5, 2026
Unprepared: The Broken Pipeline Teaching Oregon’s Teachers March 15, 2026
The Oregon Education Association is Mighty–But Slipping April 20, 2026
Attendance Tracker: What We Learned from the Latest Attendance Numbers May 1, 2026
Oregon Schools: What Went Wrong Nov. 12, 2025
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