the Myths of Reading Instruction," Dr. Patrick Groff devotes an entire chapter to a question that is most commonly asked: Why do the myths of reading instruction prevail? The answer is summarized below. There is no single reason for the fact that research findings are not applied in teacher training institutions, or in the classroom. Common sense is defeated by the: Most teachers use methods of teaching reading that their professors teach them, or they follow the teachers' guide for the textbook series used in their school system, neither of which present logical and systematic instruction in phonics. In an Education Week article, June 12, 1985, Rudolf Flesch concluded: "Decades of painstaking research have shown that neither our schools nor our teachers are to blame [for the illiteracy problem in America]. Rather, the fault lies with a method of teaching reading that was first proposed for general use in 1927 and has since been adopted in most of our schools. It is called the 'whole-word' [look and say] method because it relies on memorizing the shapes and meanings of whole words. It was introduced with the best intentions: the idea was to make learning to read more fun for our children. Today, it is almost universally used in this country." The results are evident in an illiteracy rate that is the highest in our history. We should not place the blame on our teachers but rather, we need a major overhaul of our teacher training institutions. We will not halt