We've Tried Everything: What to Do When OG Tutoring Isn't Enough

When a child has had months or even years of Orton-Gillingham tutoring and still isn't reading at grade level, the problem is almost never the program. OG is one of the strongest tools in reading intervention. But it works at the academic layer. If there are gaps in the neurological foundation underneath that layer, more instruction won't close them. This post explains what those gaps look like and what addresses them.

You have the binder. You know the difference between OG-trained and OG-certified. You found a good tutor, maybe even a great one, and you have been showing up to sessions twice a week for a year, or two years, or longer. Your child is trying. You are trying. And the gap is still there.

This is one of the most disorienting places a parent can land. Because you did the right things. You listened to the podcasts, you read Emily Hanford, you understood that structured literacy matters and you found someone who does it well. And it still isn't enough.

What I want to tell you is this: you are not missing something obvious. The tutoring was right. The program was probably right. What is likely missing is not more of the same thing, but a completely different layer, one that has to be in place before the academic work can fully stick.

What Orton-Gillingham Does (and What It Doesn't)

Orton-Gillingham is a structured, sequential, multisensory approach to reading that explicitly teaches the connections between letters and sounds. It is the right tool for decoding instruction. Research on its use is consistent with the broader Science of Reading evidence base, and for many children it produces meaningful gains.

But even Understood.org, a well-regarded resource for parents of struggling learners, acknowledges that the research on OG as a standalone intervention is more limited than most parents realize. The reason is not that OG is flawed. The reason is that OG works at the cortical level, the thinking brain, the part of the brain responsible for learning phonics rules and applying them consciously to decode words.

What it does not address is the pre-cortical foundation: the neurological infrastructure built in the first year of life through crawling, creeping, and early developmental movement patterns. When that foundation has gaps, a child has to use their cortical brain to do jobs that should be automatic. Their eyes work harder to track print. Sitting still takes more effort than it should. Holding a pencil, crossing the midline, staying regulated long enough to receive instruction, all of it draws on resources that should be running in the background, freeing up the thinking brain for the actual work of reading.

More phonics instruction will not fix that. It will keep layering on top of a foundation that isn't ready to hold it.

What the Foundation Actually Looks Like

There is a moment I return to often in my work with families. I am sitting with a child and their parent, and I hold up a popsicle stick with a small sticker on it. I move it slowly, horizontally, in front of the child's eyes. A lot of parents expect their child to track it smoothly. Instead, they watch the whole head follow, or the eyes jump and skip, or one eye drifts while the other holds.

Then I add one small thing. I ask the child to name animals that live in the ocean while they track the stick. And the eye tracking, whatever it was before, gets worse the moment thinking enters the picture.

That is the moment for most parents when everything they have been seeing at the kitchen table starts to make sense. Their child is using their cortical brain, their smart, thinking brain, to hold their eyes on the page. Every bit of energy going to that task is energy that is not available for decoding, for comprehension, for staying regulated enough to keep reading.

This is what I call the pre-cortical foundation: the automated, body-level systems that have to be running smoothly and independently before academic learning can land and stay. Successful learners have eyes that track without effort, a body that can cross the midline to write, proprioception developed enough to sit without it being a conscious act, and a nervous system organized enough to stay regulated through a 30-minute reading session. All of that develops in the first year of life through specific movement patterns, and when those patterns were incomplete or disrupted, no amount of phonics instruction compensates for it permanently.

The gap in reading progress is almost never a sign that the tutoring failed. It is almost always a sign that there is a layer underneath the academics that the tutoring was never designed to reach.

The Research Behind This

This is not a theory. The connection between retained primitive reflexes and reading difficulty has a growing body of research behind it.

The asymmetric tonic neck reflex (ATNR), which should integrate in the first year of life, has been found to be a predictor of reading ability, spelling, and verbal IQ when it persists into school age. Children with higher levels of retained primitive reflexes consistently show lower reading performance across multiple studies.

A 2023 study by Grigg and colleagues, published in the Journal of Neurology and Experimental Neuroscience, followed 98 children ages six to eight over ten months. Children who completed four short movement sequences five minutes per day, four or more times per week, showed a statistically significant improvement in reading scores (p = 0.002) compared to controls who did not. The intervention group's reflex profiles also dropped significantly (p = 0.018). Five minutes a day. Movement, not phonics.

A 2026 systematic review in ScienceDirect analyzing multiple intervention studies found that programs targeting primitive reflex integration consistently showed improved developmental outcomes for children, with effect sizes ranging across studies depending on intervention frequency and duration.

This is the layer most reading intervention skips entirely, not because it isn't important, but because most tutors were never trained in it.

What "We've Tried Everything" Parents Often Notice

If you have been in this long enough, some of these probably sound familiar.

Your child makes gains with the tutor and then loses them over summer. Or they decode reasonably in a session and fall apart the moment they have to read in context. Or they can read a word on one page and not recognize it two paragraphs later. Or they know the rule but cannot apply it when they are tired, or stressed, or when the text gets harder.

These are not signs of a lazy child or an ineffective tutor. They are signs of a nervous system that is working too hard to support the basics, and has nothing left for retention and transfer when the conditions get harder.

I have worked with a fourth-grade boy who came to me reading at a late first-grade level. We did Orton-Gillingham work, and progress was slow. It had plateaued. The summer after fourth grade, I completed a full developmental evaluation and added a NeuroDevelopmental Movement® program alongside the reading work. Something shifted in how he engaged with the text. By seventh grade, he was reading at grade level and no longer had a reading IEP. Five-plus grade levels in three years, after years of progress that had stalled.

The reading instruction did not change. What changed was the foundation underneath it.

The Stakes of Waiting

The Annie E. Casey Foundation's Double Jeopardy study, which tracked nearly 4,000 students over time, found that children who are not reading proficiently by the end of third grade are four times more likely to not graduate from high school on time than children who are proficient readers. One in six children below proficiency by third grade will not finish high school on time.

That number exists because the reading gap does not stay static while families wait and try more of the same thing. It widens. A child who could have had their pre-cortical gaps addressed in kindergarten needs exponentially more intervention to close the same gap at third grade. But the academic cost is only half the story.

The other half is what happens to a child's identity when kindergarten, first grade, and second grade are all years of struggle. A child who spends those years feeling behind, feeling like reading is something other kids can do but they cannot, has already written a story about themselves by the time third grade arrives. The academic gap is addressable. The identity wound is far harder to undo.

This is why, at Forston Learning, we do not wait.

What Comes Next: A Different Starting Point

If your child has had solid OG instruction and progress has plateaued, the next question is not "which program should we try next." The next question is: what is happening in the body and nervous system underneath the reading struggle?

NeuroDevelopmental Movement® (NDM) addresses the pre-cortical foundation: the developmental movement sequences from early childhood that build the neurological infrastructure for attention, eye tracking, regulation, and fine motor control. It does not replace OG or the Science of Reading approach. It is the layer underneath them, and it works on a different part of the brain.

The Move Play Thrive research summary draws together multiple studies connecting primitive reflex integration work to gains in reading, self-regulation, and social-emotional functioning, across both classroom and home-based implementation.

At Forston Learning, we begin every family's work with a full developmental evaluation so we can see exactly which pre-cortical gaps exist for that specific child. Nothing is assigned until we know. The movement plan that follows is built for that child's developmental profile, not pulled from a generic protocol. And because the daily movement practice happens at home, with the parent, families are not just passengers. They are the practitioners.

What I know from years of sitting with parents in that evaluation room is this: the moment they see what has been happening underneath the academics, the confusion lifts. Not because the path forward is easy. Because now they understand what the path forward actually is.

Ready to Find Out What's Underneath?

If your child has had tutoring, tried interventions, and is still not where they should be, the "Is This the Right Fit?" call is the best starting point. It is a free 30-minute conversation to explore whether a NeuroDevelopmental Movement® evaluation makes sense for your child.