COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — The battle over how to teach reading has landed in court.
With momentum shifting in favor of research-backed strategies known as the “science of reading,” states and some school districts have been ditching once popular programs amid concerns that they aren’t effective.
A legal fight in Ohio centers on a state ban of material that uses a common technique called three-cueing. It involves encouraging students to draw on meaning, sentence structure and visual clues to identify words, asking questions like: “What is going to happen next?,” “What is the first letter of the word?” or “What clues do the pictures offer?”
The technique is a key part of the Reading Recovery program used in more than 2,400 U.S. elementary schools. The Reading Recovery Council of North America filed a lawsuit earlier this month, saying lawmakers infringed on the powers of state and local education boards by using a budget bill to ban three-cueing.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, blasted the lawsuit, calling evidence in favor of the science of reading “abundantly clear.”