How politics is getting in the way of teaching kids to read

Even though much of America’s education landscape is so depressing right now, there is hope that better times could be ahead. Today, states — both red and blue — are pass laws that emphasize the teaching of reading using proven evidence-based methods such as phonics instruction.

The inability of America’s children to read proficiently is frightening.

On the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) fourth-grade reading exam , 66% of students taking the exam failed to achieve at the proficient level.

The results were even worse on the eighth grade reading exam, with 69% of students who took the test failed to demonstrate proficiency.

These poor reading scores are the result of too many schools using ineffective instructional approaches such as balanced literacy that rely on the so-called “three-cueing method.”

A 2023 National Council on Teacher Quality study says that under the three-cueing reading instructional approach, “children who encounter a word they do not recognize are instructed to use one of three strategies: ‘guess what the word might be’ based on context; ‘look at the picture to help guess what the word might be;’ and ‘look at the first letter to help guess what the word might be,’ and if the guess makes sense, then check to see if it ‘looks right.’”

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In other words, instead of sounding out letters and connecting them to make a word, the three-cueing method encourages children to guess what the word might be.

Yet, as the NCTQ study points out, “Despite widespread use by K-2 and elementary special education teachers, reading experts discourage guessing techniques because they represent lost opportunities to help children practice decoding [i.e., pronouncing], and represent an ineffective strategy for reading advanced texts.”

In fact, the ineffectiveness of the three-cueing technique has become so apparent that a top popularizer of three-cueing, the Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University’s Teachers College, was dissolved last year amid growing criticism.

A Georgia school principal said her school had used the three-cueing method, but “we didn’t have the data to back up what we were doing.”

Thankfully, policymakers are finally moving to implement reading instructional programs that actually have proven records of effectiveness.

Last year, 17 states enacted laws or implemented policies encouraging schools to adopt the science of reading, which emphasizes techniques such as phonics that attach speech sounds to letters — along with letter combinations that give students the ability to sound out words when they see them on a page.

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The NCTQ has reported that more than half a century of reading research shows that use of science-of-reading instructional methods “could dramatically reduce the rate of reading failure.”

States switching to the science of reading span the political spectrum.

In 2023, heavily red Indiana enacted a law that requires school districts to adopt curriculum aligned with the science of reading and bans use of the three-cueing teaching method.

This year, in deep blue New York, Gov. Hochul’s Back to Basics Initiative, which increases funding for programs promoting the science of reading, was enacted in the 2024-25 state budget.

Evidence shows that student reading performance improves when states change to science-of-reading instruction.

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According to the NCTQ, when Mississippi switched to a comprehensive science-of-reading approach, “the state saw fourth grade NAEP scores rise dramatically, including for historically marginalized groups such as Black and Hispanic students.”

While some states are moving to the science of reading, others, unfortunately, are encountering special-interest roadblocks.

In California, a bill by Democratic state legislator Blanca Rubio to integrate the science of reading in teacher training and curriculum decisions stalled in the face of opposition from the powerful California Teachers Association. The union claimed that the science of reading is still evolving and that teachers should have the discretion to choose which instructional method to use. But the overwhelming research evidence shows that the science of reading is the best way to teach reading and that many teachers, unfortunately, lack the adequate training needed to effectively pass on these skills to their students.

Nonetheless, as Rubio told me in an interview for my new Pacific Research Institute book, “The Great Classroom Collapse,” many Democrat and Republican legislators have come together to co-sponsor her bill because on this issue, “They don’t care about their political ideology, they’re caring about the outcomes for kids.”

“Teachers have unions,” said Rubio, but “students do not.”  “We are the only ones that have to advocate for the kids.”

Despite such setbacks, the momentum is on the side of reading instruction that actually works.  As Hochul said, “we’re throwing out debunked reading instruction practices and getting back to basics, using phonics, reading comprehension, and other effective techniques to set our kids up for success.”

Lance Izumi is senior director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute.  He is the author of the new book “ The Great Classroom Collapse : Teachers, Students, and Parents Expose the Collapse of Learning in America’s Schools .”

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