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Texas legislature has banned 3-cueing as of 2023. I have never been happier about something this state did.

When you talk to whole language proponents, it's clear pretty quickly that the distrust of phonics instruction is motivated by a fear that reading will be reduced to rote and boring phonics drills. One of the reasons whole language flourished in the 1970s and '80s is that it rejected the idea that children should sit quietly in rows listening to a teacher direct a lesson. "In whole language, the battle was seen as, 'Are you in favor of literacy or are you in favor of skills?'" Seidenberg said. He said no one is advocating for rote and boring lessons. But the science shows clearly that when reading instruction is organized around a defined progression of concepts about how speech is represented by print, kids become better readers. There is also widespread support in the research for the effectiveness of teacher-directed lessons as opposed to letting children discover key concepts about reading on their own. What's also clear in the research is that phonics isn't enough. Children can learn to decode words without knowing what the words mean. To comprehend what they're reading, kids need a good vocabulary, too. That's why reading to kids and surrounding them with quality books is a good idea. The whole language proponents are right about that. But, according to the research, kids who can't decode will never be good readers. Some children learn decoding quickly with minimal instruction. Others need a lot more help. But good phonics instruction is beneficial for all kids, even those who learn to decode easily; research shows they become better spellers. The belief that learning to read is a natural process that occurs when children are surrounded by books is a problem not just because there's no science to back it up. It's a problem because it assumes the primary responsibility for teaching children to read lies with families, not schools. If you're not fortunate enough to grow up in a household where there are lots of books and adults who read to you, you may be out of luck. There is no debate at this point among scientists that reading is a skill that needs to be explicitly taught by showing children the ways that sounds and letters correspond. "It's so accepted in the scientific world that if you just write another paper about these fundamental facts and submit it to a journal they won't accept it because it's considered settled science," Moats said. According to all the research, what you should see in every school is a heavy emphasis on explicit phonics instruction in the early grades. There is no evidence this turns kids off to reading or makes reading harder. In fact, it's the opposite. If you do a good job teaching phonics in the early grades, kids get off to a quicker start. "And they accelerate their progress faster and read more and like it better and so it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle," Moats said. "Whereas the converse is true. When you don't give kids insight into the code and don't arm them with insight into language, both spoken and written, what happens is, 'This is a mystery. I'm not sure I'm getting what these words really say. Therefore, I'm uncomfortable. And therefore, I don't really like it.'"

Hard Words: Why aren't kids being taught to read?

Scientific research has shown how children learn to read and how they should be taught. But many educators don't know the science and, in some cases, actively resist it. As a result, millions of kids are being set up to fail.