Concerned about quality of reading instruction, Legislature asks SED to define best practices

The demise of Reading First - which many view as a matter of politics rather than merit - led to another approach called "balanced literacy" that incorporated both phonics and whole language.

As explained in the award-winning podcast, "Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong" by APM Reports, reading instruction has been dominated by a few academic gurus for several decades. Lucy Calkins of Teachers College at Columbia University and other influential academics including Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell believed (and still believe) that instilling a love of reading is the most important task. Their philosophical insight was that learning to decode words with phonics just isn't much fun, and they promoted other techniques that countless teachers in the United States have used to energize young readers.

Cueing seen as a mistake

Both Calkins and the team of Fountas and Pinnell promoted a technique called "cueing" or "three cueing" that involves encouraging young readers to try to deduce what words are based on context, asking questions like: What word would make sense here? Does the word you are thinking of look like the word on the page? Would it sound right? That widely used approach is now viewed as unsupported by research and has been discredited.

Cueing has fallen into such disfavor that Columbia University last year dissolved Dr. Calkin's phenomenally successful training business called the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. Calkins, who remains a professor at Teachers College, says research has persuaded her to place more emphasis on the importance of phonics in early grades. "The last two or three years, what I've learned from the science of reading work has been transformational," Calkins told The New York Times in 2022.

Some still believe in cueing, however. A training group called the Reading Recovery Council of North America is suing the state of Ohio in an attempt to overturn a ban on cueing in that state.

Learning loss during the pandemic prompted some state governments to take steps to ensure that young students were learning phonics. In 2023, eight states banned cueing from instruction, teacher preparation programs or both, according to ExcelinEd, an advocacy organization founded by former Florida governor Jeb Bush.

In New York, the Legislature is taking a softer approach by requiring the State Education Department to identify best practices. It also allocated $10 million for training.

Ahead of the curve

By Sept. 1, 2025, all school districts must verify to SED by that their curriculums and instructional practices are aligned with best practices. Some districts have been pursuing the science of reading for years.

On Long Island, the Lynbrook Union Free School District's journey began in 2021 with an internal committee discussion about middle school referrals related to reading and pandemic-related learning issues, according to Gerard Beleckas, assistant superintendent for curriculum, instruction & assessment.

"We decided to work with Sounds-Write, a U.K-based company, for the phonics instruction and Itchy's Alphabet, a Canadian-based company, for handwriting," Dr. Beleckas said. Itchy's Alphabet embeds visual cues for the letter shapes. For instance, the lowercase letter "a" is represented by an apple with a stem and stalk in the shape of an "a."

The instruction "emphasizes learning sounds before letter names and teaches at the word level," he said.

Lynbrook's staff training on the program took six weeks. "Based on our screenings, we have seen increases in student performance on measures such as letter sounds, word segmenting and decodable words," Beleckas said. "In addition, we have seen tremendous growth in students' writing," he said.

Another district that recently experienced better literacy results is Rye City School District. The district is in its third year of literacy instruction focused on both language comprehension and the recognition of words, according to Eric Byrne, superintendent of schools. Phonics and phonemic awareness is now included in the evidence-based instruction along with fluency, comprehension and vocabulary. The district now has fewer students needing intervention, Dr. Byrne said.

How do evidence-based teaching techniques work? John Strong, an assistant professor at University of Buffalo Graduate School of Education, offered an example using the sentence: "The cat has thick black fur." A beginning reader might recognize "the cat has" but might have trouble with the three other words. Dr. Strong said a science of reading approach "would support explicit teaching of words that might be difficult to a beginning reader."

So, does one help a student read "thick" and "black"? Strong said preparation for this achievement would involve