by James A. Bacon
by James A. Bacon
There are glimmers of hope for Virginia’s public education system. Last week, Governor Glenn Youngkin issued an executive order ordering the Virginia Department of Education to create new guidelines limiting the use of cell phones in schools. Meanwhile an amendment to the Virginia Literacy Act effectively bans the use of a failed teaching method for reading known as “three-cueing” this fall.
The three-cueing technique, based on educational theories developed in the 1960s, downplays phonics in favor of deducing an unfamiliar word from its semantic, syntactic, and graphophonic contexts. A 2019 survey cited by the Richmond Times-Dispatch found that 65% of college education professors teach it as an instruction technique and 75% of K-2 and elementary special education teachers use it.
The education profession is prone to intellectual fads based upon novel academic theories such as three-cueing. But critics contend there is little social scientific evidence to support three-cuing. The tried-and-true method of teaching students to sound out words — phonics — is much more effective.
“Prior to really digging into the science of reading, a lot of cueing happened,” Lisa Coons, Virginia’s state superintendent of public instruction told the RTD. “It was more of a guessing game, and we were working to use pictures and cues and other words around it to try and figure out what the word said.
“Reading is not a natural process. Listening, speaking, all of those kinds of things are natural, intuitive human abilities that we learn and we can mimic,” she said. “Reading actually is not natural so it’s going to take instruction, and it’s going to take instruction in both hearing and sounds. When I learn to process sounds to letters, letters to words, I also have to understand what I’m reading. That’s a complex process.”
Richmond Public Schools, long an educational disaster zone, began adopting elements of the Virginia Literacy Act, enacted in 2022, as long as five years ago. Elementary school assessments show that the city’s mostly minority school children have made significant reading gains in the wake of the disastrous K-12 school shutdowns and ensuing chaos when schools reopened.
Reports the RTD:
The district this year surpassed its pre-pandemic reading levels on the PALS state assessment. In 2021, 41.4% of K-2 students passed the assessment. Last spring, the pass rate increased to 58.6%. This spring, 65.4% of K-2 students passed, slightly ahead of the 2019 pre-pandemic pass rate of 64.8%.
The two groups that saw the largest increases in pass rates were Black students and economically disadvantaged students.
“Not only do our kids know letters and sounds, but they’ve been reading — truly reading decodable texts — since the first month of school which is giving them much more practice in becoming a reader than just isolating it to letter names and sounds,” said Megan Crowe, the head literacy coach at Chimborazo Elementary School.
Bacon’s bottom line. Virginia’s public education system has two broad options at this juncture in its history. It can double down on the intersectional-oppression paradigm that attributes educational disparities to systemic racism or it can focus on what works. Systemic racism isn’t the problem in our schools. Flawed educational theories pushed by “progressive” educators are the problem. Railing against White privilege does not teach a single child how to read. Phonics does.