For me, it started with LETRS. I think they’ve changed their tune now, but they very much said that PA skills existed along a continuum of difficulty. Then I saw Essentials on the NCTQ’s very short list of exemplary books, and after reading that, I was convinced that advanced PA was a thing because Kilpatrick said it was.

Overall, I think it was a perfect storm of things. Hanford got everyone interested with her podcasts. Then, states started mandating training, and they frequently went to LETRS. When schools provided training to address learning loss, they used LETRS. Since advanced PA was new, no one establish had written anything of substance to refute the practice. Stephen Parker had only written about phonics. Shanahan hadn’t done his blog yet. Seidenberg hadn’t done his phoneme series yet. Clemens et al. hadn’t published their research yet. On the flip side, we had The Reading League endorsing the practice. So at the time when everyone was just getting excited about the science of reading, we have this new organization whose founding principle was to make research more accessible to teachers endorsing this practice. We have the most popular “science of reading training” endorsing advanced PA instruction. And we had zero people refuting it initially.