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I can still remember the day: My father sat me down at the kitchen table. It was winter. Snow lay outside and I was more interested in that than in what he had to show me. On a white tablet he wrote out the letters of the alphabet, and started teaching them to me.
I remember struggling for a while, before finally I was able to name every letter as he pointed at it. I think it took less than half an hour. Funny how he never quizzed me later to see if I remembered everything. Somehow I did.
But how did I learn to read, to make sense of those squiggly lines and put them into words and sentences? That I don’t remember. My parents read bedtime stories to me like crazy—I had a whole collection in my toy box, but my favorite was Sam The Firehouse Cat.
Reading was Fundamental
Both my parents read to me often. And somewhere along the way I just knew what the words on the page meant. I realize it was pretty simple stuff, one syllable words. But no one ever really taught me, at least not in the beginning. I just picked it up. I went into elementary school easily able to read anything the board of education threw at me. (Math was another story.)
I thought of that again recently after hearing about a method to teach reading that’s come under a lot of fire recently. Called “three-cuing” or sometimes “balanced literary,” its goal is to make the texts interesting, make sure they fit what the children want to read, and forget about sounding out words and other chores. For years this approach was the grail. But during its reign, test scores fell. That’s never good; however, test scores can fall for many reasons.
A new way to read
One of the most prominent proponents of “three-cuing” is Lucy Calkins. At Columbia University’s Teachers College, she and her team touted it. Children were told to look at the situation a word is found in—the “three cues” being meaning, syntax, and visual information. Students examine clues when they come across unfamiliar words: semantic clues (meaning), syntactic clues (sentence grammar), and graphophonic clues (how letters look on the page).
Calkins’ curriculum, “Units of Study,” is built on a vision of children as natural readers, which is what made me think back to my own pre-Cambrian childhood. I just picked things up, somehow, frustrated by the pace of the rest of the class. When I went to the public library, I bee-lined straight for the adult section (Astronomy! History!) and never spent much time in the “kids” area. (The chairs were too small anyway.) In my gut, I was very sympathetic with Calkins' view that if you let children choose what they want to read and make the curricula interesting, they’ll just take to it. I hated phonics and other “reading exercises.” At home, I just read anything that wasn’t nailed down.
In recent years, Calkins’ ways have gone from tops to flop. The previous approach, dubbed “Science of Reading,” has come back into favor with many educators. Science of Reading connects the sound of the word to the sight on the page by encouraging the child to “sound out the word” and see the context in which it is found, forging an aural-visual link that children remember. So say brain scientists who have done tests.
California: No thank you; Other states: Yes, please!
In Maryland, the Baltimore City school system is implementing the system this way: Forty minutes a day of systematic instruction on letters and sounds, along with a curriculum that will teach comprehension, vocabulary and overall knowledge. In Denver, CO and Oakland CA, Calkins’ program has been dropped, although California as a whole is not returning to phonics-based instruction, at least not yet. But Governor Gavin Newsom wants to funnel billions of dollars into a “literacy roadmap” that will help districts choose “evidence-based literacy instruction.”
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And he’s hardly alone. Since 2021, eleven states—Arkansas (2021), Louisiana (2022), Florida (2023), Indiana (2023), North Carolina (2023), South Carolina (2023), Ohio (2023), Texas (2023), West Virginia (2023), Wisconsin (2023), and Alabama (2024)—have banned three-cueing.
"All of us are imperfect"
Even Calkins has backtracked, somewhat. “All of us are imperfect,” is how she recently described her change of position. Others aren’t so forgiving. Margaret Goldberg, a Northern California literary coach, says Calkins’ approach may have damaged generations of kids. Recent test scores seem to back this up. Public school kids are doing horribly in reading.
Muddying the data, however, is the fact that they’re also doing poorly in math and science and, sadly, just about everything else. Compared to the rest of the Industrialized or “rich” nations, the U.S. is in sad shape.
Talk to educators and you quickly hear one common issue: “screen time.” And another that’s closely related: “lack of parental supervision.” We’re letting our electronic devices babysit our kids.
Electronic distractions
One teacher recently commented, “Started teaching in 2013. [The] biggest differences are phone/screen addiction, learned helplessness, and lack of accountability.” Another put it this way: “Level of curiosity... [it's] almost non-existent today. When I started in the '90s, there were always a handful of students in every class that wanted to know ‘Why?’.” A third educator summed up her opinion with: “Phone addiction. Their parents, too.”
New research seems to show that while changing over to Science of Reading techniques helps, the gains so far have been modest. A recent study out of Stanford University found two years of the approach increased reading ability one quarter year’s worth.
All of this makes our challenge harder. Equipping our children with a passion for and love of reading is crucial, because that’s how they’ll go on to discover everything else in the world. That means we have to immerse our homes in reading culture by reading a lot ourselves—and not just for work, and not just Twilight-level material. We will need every tool in our arsenal to turn our children on to the joys of reading, and if Science of Reading is one of them, then that is at very least a step in the right direction.
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