Nobody wants to teach reading.

   Nobody wants to read. 

   Just less than 20 years ago, educators, parents, students, and advocates watched with emotional Anime eyes and we were promised the impossible: 100% proficiency in math, science, and reading; 100% of students right there. The first rule of standardized testing is never pick the answer that has finite words. The answer is not never. The answer is not always. The answer is not all. The answer is not none. The answer is none of the above. 

   For 20 years, we let researchers, data analysts, and educational celebrities tell us that reading was not fundamental, it was intuitive. Kenneth Goodman and Frank Smith are credited with developing the three-cueing system in the 1960's and described reading as a "psycholinguistic guessing game." Goodman posited that proficient readers use three cues - semantics, syntactic, and graphophonic - to rely on the intuitive, contextual process, removing the reliance on decoding. (Shanahan on Literacy)

   Goodman started the pendulum, Smith jumped on it to agree in 1973 saying that readers exhibiting fluency identify words as whole units, not by sounding them out, often viewing reading as a rapid, intuitive process. But wait, there's more!

   Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire Marie Clay jumped right onto that pendulum, developing resources for testing literacy in young readers and even created an interventional system meant for first graders to keep them from falling behind. She received the fancy title for her contributions to education.

   And then, there is a theory, because there is always a theory and this theory is a doozy, especially if you have ever observed small children in their natural habitats (McDonald's Play Place). This theory argues that reading should be taught by having children use context clues to make "meaningful" guesses rather than emphasizing phonics. 

   That is just a wicked quick summary of how whole language or balanced literacy snuck into our educational system. A quick example: If you show a student a picture of a cat drinking milk with a caption that states 'The cat drinks the milk' and the child points to the cat and pronounces with the profundity of an entire academic school of thought standing behind him that "the kitten is thirsty" and then points to the caption and looks at you quizzically, that is your cue to reward them for figuring out the context of the picture. If you're looking for a soul-shattering jump-scare, let's pretend that student is now a heart surgeon. 

   Yeah... I'm not a big advocate of PBIS either. A child can't make the right choice when they do not understand what the choices are, what the choices mean to them and for them, and who is offering the choice. 

   So after about 20 years of watching our students point to the cat and call it a kitten, watching our reading scores bottom out, watching our village smile with pride as our once-kindergarteners walk across the podium, shake hands with the school board president, then quit college after the first semester because in college you don't get to point at things and make up stories. You have to comprehend. 

   Reading is intuitive - then why isn't math intuitive because at the bottom base of pedagogy, they are both a cipher, a mystery to the young learner, and they must be handed the proper tools to make sense of both, right? Nah, that's oversimplifying. 

   So now, we are apologizing to an entire generation of learners who don't read, don't want to read, and quite frankly, don't know how to read. 

   Some of those kids are still in the educational system. They are in high school. And we are going to force them into taking standardized tests that rests on the principles and theories of reading that we have not taught for 20 years. 

   If you are not infuriated then you are just word calling and cannot comprehend. 

   We are taking them to the DMV, handing them the keys to a BMW, putting them in the car with the testing officer and expecting them to pass when they have never been behind the steering wheel. Ever. 

   For 20 years, they blamed teachers, they blamed society, they blamed technology, they blamed video games, they blamed phones. That finger was so busy pointing out it didn't realize the other three fingers tucked discreetly under their knuckles were pointing to the real culprit: legislators. 

   Missouri as a state has banned the three-cueing system. It is prohibition on a verbal level, folks. So we have teachers coming out of teacher prep programs who were taught how to read using three-cueing and who are now expected to teach a method that is not only completely foreign to them, it is vaguely hiding behind a cloud of thought called "The Science of Reading." 

   The program that is not the gold standard in creating readers who understand what they read is the LETRS program. It is the John Wick of reading curriculum - slick, smart, and difficult to nail down. Because LETRS is based on the Science of Reading so there is no set curriculum, although you can invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in professional development and little help aids for your classroom, but you don't have to... but you probably should... but if you don't want to, you can just find what works for you and your staff...

   But definitely don't use three-cueing... that's illegal.