Virginia Literacy Act outlaws popular reading technique

The Virginia Literacy Act, which unanimously passed both chambers of Virginia’s legislature in 2022, requires reading intervention services for students in kindergarten through eighth grade who are struggling to read.

The ban on “three-cueing” was added as an amendment to the law in this year’s legislative session. In teaching this method, a teacher would guide a child who cannot read a word to look at pictures on the page and guess the word “elephant” in the text based on a picture of an elephant on the page. No research supports this instruction method.

A 2019 survey from EdWeek Research Center found that 75% of K-2 and elementary special education teachers use “three-cueing” to teach students how to read, and 65% of college education professors teach it as an instruction technique.

“Prior to really digging into the science of reading, a lot of cueing happened …” said Lisa Coons, Virginia’s state superintendent of public instruction. “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 added. “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.”

For the past two decades, the so-called “balanced literacy” approach has been the most predominant method of reading instruction in American schools. The method came about in the 1990s as a compromise between the “whole language” approach — based on the philosophy that kids will learn to read naturally if they are exposed to books — and approaches based on phonics, the relationship between the sounds of language and the letters that represent those sounds.

The informal truce between the two methods came to be known as the “balanced literacy” approach, and often resulted in students being taught how to guess words, instead of how to sound them out.

Virginia school divisions that have not already moved away from a balanced literacy approach this fall must implement a division-wide literacy plan based on the “science of reading,” which broadly refers to cognitive research that shows how a child’s brain learns to read.

The science of reading is also used as shorthand for instruction focused on phonics, the relationship between sounds and letters. Phonics is not a silver bullet, but researchers generally agree that most students benefit from it, especially in the early years. Research shows that phonics instruction will likely lead to increased reading performance and may be especially helpful for poor students and dyslexic students.

Mississippi was the first U.S. state to enact a “science of reading” law in 2013, and the high-poverty state saw its rankings on national test scores soar.

As of this April, 38 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws or implemented new policies related to evidence-based reading instruction since 2013, according to an Education Week analysis.

Between 2019 and 2022, fourth graders in Virginia saw the largest decrease in reading scores compared to the rest of the U.S., according to results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Post-pandemic learning loss hit Virginia’s Black and Latino students the hardest. Latino students lost almost a full year of learning in reading, a mark topped only by Ohio, according to a Harvard and Stanford analysis.

“During the pandemic, what we saw were gaps in instruction,” Coons said. “Where a child, prior to the pandemic, would be learning sounds and letters, and then letters to words, and then words to sentences, they may have missed partial sound blends to word blends. They might have missed ending sounds, and so they’re missing different parts of reading, like Swiss cheese.”

Richmond Public Schools began implementing many tenets of the Virginia Literacy Act about five years ago, including professional training for educators, reading interventions, and a division-wide curriculum.

Cassandra Bell, RPS director of curriculum and instruction, said it was a substantial change for the district. Prior to the shift to the science of reading curriculum, the division had used a “balanced literacy” approach, she said.

“Although the science of reading research has been around for over 50 years, we were just shifting to that approach,” Bell said. “We were kind of on the front lines and moving forward before the rest of the state caught on. That’s exciting for us, but it definitely has been a journey.”

Researchers generally agree that effective reading instruction requires five key concepts: phonemic awareness, the understanding that words are made up of sounds; phonics, connecting the sound to the letter; fluency, reading words quickly without hesitation; vocabulary, knowing the definitions of words; and comprehension, understanding the text.

RPS has seen significant progress in elementary reading scores over the past few years, which school leaders believe will eventually translate to similar progress in the upper grade levels.

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.

Cordell Watkins, the principal at Chimborazo Elementary School in Richmond, said the division’s literacy curriculum has leveled the playing field.

“We are level setting. That really adds a lot of challenge for some students, but we find ways for them to reach for it,” Watkins said. “If we don’t set the bar high, they’re not going to achieve high.”

RPS will not have to make any substantial changes to meet the requirements of the Virginia Literacy Act, only small tweaks, Watkins said.

Megan Crowe, the head literacy coach at Chimborazo, said kindergarten students are learning to read within the first month of school. As soon as they have four or five letter sounds down, which happens in the first few weeks, they are taught letter formation and work on blending sounds.

“That I think is one of the crucial pieces that we’ve seen in kindergarten making the difference for our kids,” Crowe said.

“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.”

RPS Superintendent Jason Kamras said the Virginia Literacy Act is important for kids across Virginia and most important for low-income kids, because it levels the playing field.

“I criticize the state a lot but on this one I gotta give them kudos because the VLA is a really big deal,” Kamras said.

Kamras said RPS’ goal is to have “100% proficient and joyful readers by the end of third grade.”

Research shows that children who read on grade level by the end of third grade are more likely to graduate high school and have higher lifelong incomes than those who don’t.

“I really do believe we can do that here in Richmond,” Kamras said. “I think we’re small enough to wrap our hands around it and I think we are now being really strategic about how we’re training principals, coaches, teachers.”

“I don’t think there’s anything that we could do that is more important to our kids living truly free lives, and so we’re going to do it.”